


Dark Silver

by ashesandhoney



Category: The Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Fluff and Angst, Major Illness, Multi, OT3, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2018-09-12 04:17:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 53
Words: 108,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9054973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: William Herondale is in love with his parabatai's fiance. He can survive the days that he can avoid seeing them together but after a malfunctioning portal lands the three of them hundreds of miles from home, he cannot disappear into the streets of London for hours at a time. Hundreds of miles from London is hundreds of miles from help and hundreds of miles from the yin fen that Jem needs to survive.  (This is an OT3 bed sharing fic that got out of hand. It branches off from canon about two weeks after the end of Clockwork Prince)





	1. In the Wrong Bed

A finger jabbed into the side of his head woke him up. He muttered a swear word and turned his face into the warmth beside him. Will hadn't slept much the night before. He'd been out wandering London and not thinking about anything. At least that had been his intention. He'd spent most of the walk thinking about Tessa and the rest of it thinking about ways to convince Cecily to go home. He'd been tired enough when he got back that he had collapsed into Jem's bed and fallen asleep immediately.

Jem poked him again. "Do you ever look where you're going?"

"Did I bump into a lady with an ugly hat?" Will asked.

He wasn't moving. He had every intention of sleeping through breakfast. If Jem wanted to get up and go and listen to Cecily be a little ball of brightness and enthusiasm about Shadowhunting then he was welcome to it. Will would just stay here. He was warm and comfortable and for all his poking Jem was half lying on him and the weight of another person was enough to blot out the worst of his thoughts.

"Wake up, you lazy bastard," Jem said.

"Go on without me, just leave me here to die," Will said.

"Take your ridiculous melodrama back to your own room," Jem hissed.

"I'm wounded. Deeply," Will muttered.

Rather than answering, Jem twisted away from him and then back again. It was less like Jem was trying to push him out of bed, which he was halfway expecting, and more like the kind of lurch that came with a nightmare or a fever dream. Will was immediately awake. Jem had sounded fine. Had been fine. Fine for weeks now. Will rolled up on his elbow and realized why Jem's voice had been so annoyed.

The weight against his shoulder hadn't been Jem.

It was Tessa.

He stared for a little too long and with no idea what his expression was doing. He wasn't sure he could remember the last time he hadn't known what expression was on his face. He had probably still been in Wales.

Her hair was braided but falling loose. He had just gotten into bed with her and Jem without looking and she'd rolled up against him in the night. She had woken with a start from some sort of nightmare and Jem had caught her face and turned her to look at him. Will stared stupidly at the back of her head while Jem shot him a glare over her shoulder.

"It was just a dream," Jem was saying to her in that soft voice he didn't use with with anyone else. Will needed to leave but her leg was hooked over his and he was tangled in the blankets and he was still too dumbstruck to remember how to get up.

He had just spent the night in bed with the girl he was in love with.

And her fiance.

"You, Nate, I thought," she stumbled over the words.

"Just a dream. They'll pass, the nightmares pass eventually," Jem said.

"Nate didn't deserve to die like that," she said.

Will's conscious self hadn't caught up. He made a face, she couldn't see it, she hadn't even noticed that he was there yet. Jem pulled her into his arms so she could rest her head on his shoulder. Jem gave Will that look again. They had mastered a sort of shorthand that didn't really translate. Jem's look said that he agreed with Will's opinion that Nate probably could have died slower and bloodier and still deserved worse but that if he said something like that to Tessa, it wouldn't end well.

The look also said, “Get out.”

Will cracked a smile.

"Get out," Jem mouthed at him though his lip twitched in response.

Tessa's breathing had evened out and the moment that she realized that Will was there was going to awful. He wasn't going to be able to escape without her noticing now that she was actually awake. Hopefully, he'd be able to blame sleep deprivation or perhaps temporary madness for what he said next.

It was probably the madness.

The way she was relaxing into Jem was killing him by degrees. He could not watch them share a private moment. He could barely watch them sit side by side at the breakfast table with clothing and manners and space between them.

"Could you possibly give me my legs back?" he asked in the most polite voice he could muster. It was the kind of voice he usually saved for asking for sugar at high tea with some titled Lady who had something he needed.

Tessa pulled up sharply and spun on him and while that was what he had wanted, he immediately felt guilty for it. She twisted around to look at him and managed to end up sitting on Jem's lap with her legs still twisted with Will's. He gave them both the smarmiest grin he could muster. He could either be apologetically embarrassed or offensive. Anything between those two extremes was beyond him in that moment so he had defaulted to offensive. He raised his eyebrows and her shock narrowed into baffled anger. Her expression was as eloquent as any of Jem’s. It very clearly said that she might slap him.

Slapping would be preferable to all the cuddling.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"Sneaking into James' bed on a bad night was my habit long before it was yours," Will said.

Her mouth fell open and she turned scarlet and he felt guilty again. He held onto feeling guilty because maybe it would prevent him from feeling anything else. She was adorable when she was sleep rumpled and confused.

"Stop," Jem said. Sharp and low.

Before that tone of voice could become a fight that Will did not want to be having, Henry walked into the room. He appeared in mid-sentence. His hair stuck up on one side as though he had been sleeping on his arm and forgotten to smooth it down. His shirt was untucked and his striped waistcoat was buttoned unevenly. He was talking and shuffling blueprints in his hand. He had done this before. He forgot that one knocked before one just opened a bedroom door. He was mid explanation and had probably forgotten that no one could actually hear him while he walked down the hallways alone.

"Perhaps this is best kept a secret," Will said fast and quiet.

Jem sighed in annoyance. It wasn't artful and Tessa was still too alarmed to be helpful but they managed to stuff her under the blankets. Jem slept with a duvet that made the bed a lumpy mess on the best of days and while it would have been obvious to someone paying attention that there was another person hiding in the bed, Henry still hadn't actually looked up. It had taken about ten seconds.

Henry finally looked up and paused. He had been talking about magic balances and frowning at a paper. He cocked his head to the side and smiled at Will. For all Will’s judgements on Henry’s messy hair, he knew that he didn’t look any better. He took a moment to try and smooth his curls down into something that resembled order but it probably didn’t work. Not that Henry was going to notice.

"Oh you are here, that's good, I thought you might be when your room was empty," Henry said.

Jem's lips were a little tighter than usual but he flashed a smile at Henry as he settled back against the headboard. Will readjusted himself so that the blankets were more twisted and obscured the shape of anything below them. Tessa jabbed him in the ribs and he stopped moving. Her legs were over his lap and her nightgown was bunched up around him which meant it wasn't covering as much of her as it was supposed to and even if he couldn't see that, couldn’t stop himself from he knowing it.

He had no idea what Henry was talking about.

"Henry," Jem finally managed to get a word in to interrupt him, "Can we please save complex mathematics for after breakfast?"

Henry looked up and blinked. His hair was a mess and he looked like he had been awake for hours. He had probably been awake most of the night if he was in the middle of some project. Will raised his eyebrows and Jem had a kind, earnest, inarguable smile on his face. Henry looked down at his blueprints and then back up.

"I suppose so, do you think it's about time for breakfast then?" he asked.

"Yes," they said together.

"Well, perhaps Lottie will have some ideas on the conversions, it's unusual for a spell to use more than one language and multiple demon languages too," Henry said.

"We will help you look for other examples in the library as soon as we are dressed and fed, tea at the very least," Jem said.

Henry finally left the room after two more false starts at explaining. Will huffed and slouched back. He had gone from the inability to stop thinking about Tessa to forgetting there was a girl in his lap and now her knees were over his stomach and that was far worse than over his legs where they had been a moment ago. Perhaps if he pretended hard enough, he could imagine her someplace else, anywhere else.

"Why did you have to volunteer us both?" Will grumbled.

Jem ignored him to help Tessa up out of the mess of blankets. She finally managed to get herself seated in the bed so she wasn't touching Will. It was a vast improvement. Her nightdress was smoothed back down and tucked in place. He would not let himself even think about the fact that the distance was disappointing.

"Go get dressed," Jem said.

"No, you've volunteered me to spend the morning in the library up to my neck in demonology spell books. The only thing worse than trying to read Purgatic is trying to read spells in Purgatic. The only way it could be worse if if we were trying to read spells in Purgatic first thing in the morning, oh but we are," Will said.

"You're moaning about that?" Tessa asked.

"Says the girl who can't read Purgatic and is therefore spared the parsing of spell book grammar," Will said.

She frowned at him. She sat in the nest of blankets, close enough to touch, her knee against Jem's and her hair tugged out of her braid so it was haloing around her head. He gave her a lazy shrug as though enough insouciance could insulate him from wanting to smooth her hair down and kiss that little frown line between her eyebrows. It wasn't working.

Her embarrassment and her confusion were gone and she rolled her eyes at him. She was still angry but it wasn’t as hostile as it had been before Henry had interrupted them. She pushed her hair back with both hands before turning to brace both of her feet against his hip, lean into Jem for leverage and push him out of the bed.

He hit the floor with a whomp and Jem started to cackle and a moment later Tessa joined him.

"The both of you are terrors and you deserve each other," Will said rolling to his feet.

They were leaning together, laughing at him. He crossed his arms and Tessa started to laugh harder. She rested her head on Jem's shoulder and laughed until she was gasping for breath as she said, "You're so tall and angry and your hair is ridiculous."

"My hair is perfect, multitudes are overcome by jealousy when they so much as recall my hair to memory," Will said.

She didn't look at him while she trailed into giggles. He glanced at Jem who just shrugged.

Leave.

The little sane part of his mind whispered it over and over.

Leave.

Leave.

Leave.

He hadn't heard her laugh like that in a long time. Maybe he had never heard it. He couldn't remember anymore if he had ever heard her laugh like that. He couldn't leave that laughter and know he was never going to hear it again, at least never hear it directed at him again. So he threw a pillow at her face. He was not eight years old. She was not his little sister but he did it anyways. Jem glared and spread his hands like he couldn't believe it. Jem’s expression was calling him all sorts of rude names but Will had already started this.

She surprised them both when she picked up the pillow and smacked Will with it. She came up out of Jem's arms and across the bed faster than he had expected but certainly not faster than he could have avoided. Surprise or a stupid desire to stretch this bizarre little moment out as far as it could be stretched kept him in place.

"Go away," she said after slapping him across the face with white cotton and goose down wielded like a weapon.

"You're the one creeping about, all unmarried and in bed with boys," Will shot back and he knew even as it escaped that it was too far over the line. She gave him a look that reminded him that he had once told her he loved her and that he had once told her she was no better than a whore and that he hadn't been forgiven for either.

And the moment was gone. Shattered and broken because he didn’t know how to watch his mouth.

"We aren't, we didn't," she started.

"I know," Will said, "I apologize and it is none of my business. I'll see you at breakfast."

And he turned and left as fast as he could.


	2. The Things You Say

Jem rushed his morning routine. He wanted to head off Will and whatever unforgivable thing Will was going to say next. Will had always been a bastard but Jem had never been quite this angry with him for it. There was starting fights with Gabriel Lightwood and being rude to Charlotte but his behaviour that morning had been worse. The stumbling into bed was forgivable but then Will had taken a small mistake and set it aflame by opening his inconsiderate mouth.

It was unforgivable that Will had said something like that to her, had implied something like that about her. Jem stopped in the hall and rubbed his forehead. He was angrier than he might have been because Will had lashed out at Tessa. Will said things like that all the time and Jem had never been quite so willing to strangle him before. He shook his head and put his hand on Will’s doorframe. He was not being unfair in his anger at Will over this. He had been too forgiving in the past and Will hadn’t deserved that either.

“When I told you last week that I wished you would speak to her more, that was not what I had in mind,” Jem said as he slammed through the door into Will’s room.

Will was lying on his back on his bed and didn’t so much as shift at Jem’s entrance. He was wearing the same clothes from the day before and his hair was still sticking up at all angles after sleeping on it.

Jem dropped Will’s boots on the floor one at a time. They each landed with a heavy thud. He threw the jacket Will had left in his room at Will’s face. Will’s hand came up to catch it and he dropped it over the edge of the bed to lie in a heap beside the boots, a pile of books and an upturned teacup. Will’s room was a disaster. Of course, Will’s room was a disaster. That shouldn’t have been a surprise.

“You left those after your dramatic exit,” Jem said.

Will stayed still. Jem leaned a shoulder against the poster of the bed and took a deep breath. The room smelled like a library that hadn’t been cleaned in awhile. Paper and dust and rain water. Will had left the window open and the sill was damp from the storm the night before. Will didn’t move and Jem waited for him to say something. Say anything. Apologize or defend himself or make some joke like it could all be swept under the rug

Will sat up in one fluid motion and looked up at Jem with a surprising expression on his face. It was contrite but not in any of the ways that Jem had been expecting. It wasn’t joking or defensive. Jem’s anger fluttered but didn’t evaporate. Forgiving Will and protecting Will had been a reflex for so long that he almost abandoned his anger out of habit. His chest locked up and he couldn’t look away from Will. Jem didn’t let himself fall into that trap.

“As inappropriate as having her in my room was, nothing happened that would warrant your comments. If you ever bring it up to her again, I will never forgive you. Stay out of my room,” Jem growled.

Will looked almost like he was grieving. His expression shifted and then shifted back and neither of the expressions were something Jem could read. Usually he could read Will without a second thought but maybe that wasn’t true, maybe he had never been able to read Will at all. Maybe Will just showed him what he wanted him to see. His heart beat heavy in his chest and he curled his hands into fists as though he could control the anger if he held onto it tightly enough.

Will nodded and looked away without a word.

That Jem could read.

“I didn’t mean it like that, I meant leave Tessa alone.”

“I suppose I should start practicing. Once you’re married, I can hardly spend my time in your room as we once did,” Will said.

“That is not what this is about.”

“I know that,” Will said with a sigh. He dropped back onto the bed. Lying flat on his back with one knee hanging over the edge of the bed and that unreadable expression back on his face.

Jem just stared. He had been prepared for Will to be dismissive or hostile. He had been braced for jokes that made him regret ever holding out a hand to William Herondale when they had been children. He didn’t know what to do with this flatness. Will was bright and exuberant even in his anger and his horribleness. This flat unreadable Will was not like anything Jem had seen before.

He had changed over the last weeks but Jem had trouble making sense of the changes. Was he worried about being offensive in front of his sister? He had been less terrible since Cecily had arrived. Most of the time. To Sophie and Charlotte at least, Will had been better but not with Tessa.

“Why do you hate her so much?” Jem asked.

“I don’t.”

“You won’t stay in the same room as her. When you do speak to her, it’s to be rude or to make unforgivable jokes. You refuse to so much as look at her. It’s like you’re trying to will her out of existence by sheer force of your disinterest,” Jem said.

“I don’t mean it as a slight against her.”

“By the Angel, William. What does that even mean?” Jem said. He sat down on the edge of the bed and pushed Will’s outstretched foot out of his way. Will didn’t respond so Jem kept talking. “Is this about us and the things we could never have? That is between you and I and you haven’t any right to drag her into it. We have both known that it couldn’t be since we were children.”

This was not a subject they discussed and neither of them had brought it up in two years. Jem couldn’t remember who had finally decided that they had gone too far. Probably him. Will would follow a bad decision all the way to the ends of the earth.

While they still shared beds and spent afternoons curled up together, there were lines they didn’t cross.

But they had once.

Will had been the first person Jem had ever kissed. He was the only person Jem had ever kissed before Tessa.

They had gone too far, the explorations of curious children just coming into their bodies had shifted as they’d gotten older. There were rules. One did not do certain things with one’s parabatai. They had probably violated the law at one point or another but Jem had purposefully never gone and looked up the letter of that law. He had let it go as a childhood crush.

“Why? Do you miss me, Carstairs?” Will snapped.

And there it was.

That tone of voice was the one that Jem had come into the room braced for. Lilting and harsh edged. Will didn’t move as he said it and then once the words were out, his hands came up to rub his eyes. His face disappeared behind both hands and he held them over his eyes and held still while Jem sighed. At least they were back on level ground. Will being sarcastic was predictable if infuriating.

Will sat up and Jem had been expecting him to be so close. He was close enough that he was almost touching. Jem leaned in without breaking that barrier of space between them. Just close enough to make it clear that he wasn’t going to let Will intimidate him by pushing on those old lines.

“I wouldn’t have to miss you if you didn’t stop running out of the room the minute I enter it,” Jem said pretending that he hadn’t brought up that old baggage. He wanted to close that box and let that all stay in the past. Will was too close for those kinds of thoughts to be running through Jem’s mind. It needed to stay closed. Tessa was all he wanted now. They’d put the thing between them away because they weren’t children and it couldn’t happen. He had Tessa and Will would find someone too, one day.

Will was frowning just a little bit. Tight jaw, narrowed eyes.

And it suddenly made sense.

“I’m not going to abandon you. We may not spend as much time in bed as we used to but you are my friend and my brother and I love you. Tessa doesn’t change that. I love her. I love her so much but that can’t touch this bond,” he flattened his hand against Will’s chest where the parabatai rune was drawn below the white fabric of his shirt. Will looked down at his hand and then back up to hold his eyes.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Will said. “And contrary to popular belief, I didn’t mean to hurt her either.”

Jem nodded.

Goddamn Will.

Jem had come into the room angry. He had come into the room ready to yell at Will, to force him to find some way to make amends and promise to change and to tell him all the reasons why he had been a bastard. Instead, Jem was sitting here offering the idiot comfort.

Goddamn Will.

“I hate you sometimes,” Jem said.

“I hate you, too,” Will said.

Jem closed his fist in Will’s shirt and pulled Will a little closer so they could rest with their foreheads together. Will let out a rush of air and relaxed into the touch. They sat together for a long time before Will shifted and pulled Jem into a real hug. Jem returned it.

“If you are ever a bastard to my fiancée again, I will throw you off the roof,” Jem said.

“I’d deserve it. I do deserve it,” Will said. “I’ll apologize to her.”

“No, don’t ever mention it. Pretend it didn’t happen. Let it go. Don’t make her think about it again.”

“I should apologize. I should do something to make it right.”

“Be nicer. That will make it right.”

“I’m trying,” Will said in a very quiet voice.

Will spoke into Jem’s shoulder and Jem pulled him a little closer. Will was comforting. The smell of his hair and the warmth of his skin and the way his hands twisted into Jem’s shirt were all so familiar.

There had to be a way forward where he could fit Will into this new life he was building with Tessa. He wasn’t going to have a long time left with either of them and he didn’t want to spend it putting out fires when they upset each other.

“You need to change out of this shirt,” Jem said.

“You should probably go find that fiancée of yours at breakfast or she’ll worry about you,” Will said.

Jem nodded. He needed to make sure that Tessa was feeling better after the upset of the morning and he had promised to help Henry with his project. He didn’t move for another minute. Will didn’t let go either. Finally, Jem gathered himself enough to push back from the hug and Will gave him a tilted smile and then shoved him in the shoulder.

“Don’t be a bastard,” Jem said.

“Old habits die hard,” Will said.

“Try harder. You’re supposed to be good at killing things, aren’t you? Or do you just train for fun?”

“Agility training is just such a joy, I can’t imagine doing anything else with my day,” Will said.

“Agility training is fun. We’re also probably over due for a day of it. We can set up the balance beams. You can even show Cecily how to use them.”

“Ugh. You’re mad, get out of my room. Agility training is almost as awful as sitting in the library reading purgatic which is the other thing we have to do today. Don’t make today worse and don’t bring Cece into it, she’d probably like the damn balance beams,” Will said.

Jem pushed himself up off the bed. A twinge in his ankles said that he was probably due for another dose of yin fen. He ignored that thought. He knew Will wouldn’t come to breakfast when he was in this kind of mood and made a mental note to have Sophie send him up something. Will didn’t get up and Jem squeezed his shoulder before leaving him to flop back down on the bed and stare at the ceiling like a moody hero from one of those books he liked to read.


	3. Henry's Research

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said every two days and for once in my life, I'm actually keeping an update schedule related promise! Cookies for me!

Tessa's eyes kept straying to Will. Ignoring him was a daily battle at the best of times. He made it easier by skipping breakfast and then not looking at her at all for the rest of the morning they spent in the library. A little easier. His lack of attention made her feel something that she didn’t want to think about too much.

His sister was sitting beside him, asking him questions in Welsh. He turned and frowned at her each time before giving her an answer. Tessa had never heard Will use more than a word or two of the language at a time but he seemed to be falling back into the patterns of it easily as he spoke with Cecily. Tessa had grown up around other languages. The Italians and the Poles who had lived in the building where she’d grown up hadn’t spoke English. She was always a little jealous that she had only one language to use. For some reason, Will speaking another language was unexpected.

They were dragging their way through Henry’s spells looking for similar pieces. Neither Tessa nor Cecily could really be much help. Cecily was mostly just asking questions and flipping through books with curiosity. They were flipping through spell books in languages she couldn't read, full of words that made her eyes swim if she didn't stop every few minutes. Tessa found passages with specific symbols in them and passed them to Jem or Henry to determine if they were something useful. Then she had to close her eyes and rub her head until the world came back into focus. The magic made her head hurt even if she didn’t understand it.

"Is this the magic that makes the automatons work?" Tessa asked.

"No, this is a separate project, something I've been working on for awhile now," Henry said.

Out of the corner of her eye, Tessa saw Will's lip curl into the kind of sneer he almost never made anymore. He opened his mouth but stopped before he said anything. He sighed and Cecily looked between him and Henry. He smoothed the sneer away by rubbing his hand down his face before he spoke.

"Henry, do you mean to tell me you've got us all doing what we thought was immediately essential research in the quest to find Axel Mortmain and it is in fact one of your pet projects?" Will asked.

"It could be very important in finding Mortmain," Henry said. He had flipped the book, Tessa had passed him sideways and was tilting his head at the pages.

"And what, pray tell, is it?" Will asked.

"Years ago, I had an idea for a portal but there have always been some issues with it. Ideally, we will be able to locate the origin of an object and then follow it through to its place of origin," Henry said. “It combines a summoning spell with a traveling spell. It would be quite easy with warlock magic.”

"You're making a portal with demonic magic?" Jem asked. "That's illegal."

“Very illegal,” Will added.

"If I can understand how these summoning spells work then perhaps I can reproduce them with runes from the Gray Book. The prototype hasn’t been successful yet but this is promising. The trick is to not use demonic magic but to still achieve the power. Shadowhunters can create portal like magic. We use a portal to travel from London to Idris. I just want to make it a little more responsive to our needs," Henry said.

He was still scratching notes on a piece of paper beside him while everyone else in the room watched him. Jem was frowning. Will was trying to hide his annoyance and Cecily looked curious. Tessa was caught by the realization of how little magic she understood. To find the origin of an object sounded impossible but to use magic to transport oneself there was even more impossible. A voice in the back of her mind reminded her that she could transform herself into another person and think their thoughts, this wasn't any less mad than that.

Will pressed his lips into a line to keep himself from saying something rude. Tessa had been paying far more attention to him than she wanted to admit over the last few weeks and had noticed these moments over and over again. She had expected him to make a declaration of some sort, to tell everyone the nature of his curse but he hadn't. He had simply slipped into these patterns of forced calm and intentional kindnesses and left everyone to guess after his behaviour.

"So, it will open a doorway from one place to another?" Cecily asked.

"Ideally," Henry said finally looking up at the actual enthusiasm in Cecily's voice.

Will narrowed his eyes at his sister who leaned forward on her elbows. She was young enough that sometimes Tessa looked at her and saw a child instead of a young woman though Cecily was only about two years younger than she was. With her eyes lit up at the prospect of magic and leaning in like that, she looked even younger than she was.

"How does that work?" she asked.

Everyone else, even Tessa, looked at her in alarm.

Henry would explain it.

In great detail.

She seemed genuinely interested but Tessa knew that by the quarter of an hour mark, Henry would be speaking in concepts that no one else except perhaps the Silent Brothers and a select few warlocks had even bothered to learn the existence of. Henry lit up at the prospect of an enthusiastic audience. He brandished his stack of papers at Cecily with a big grin on his face.

"It is possible to open a portal between our realm and a demonic realm so why not within our realm as well? It is the difference between adding a window to your front parlour and renovating your home to add an extra door to the kitchen, so slightly more complex but not impossible and the skills are much the same," Henry said.

"You cannot open a portal to the demon realms using the Gray Book," Jem pointed out.

"But you could, theoretically, open a portal to heaven. Same theory, different location. The runes should be adaptable," Henry said.

Will coughed out the word, "Myth."

"There is truth in all myths," Henry said evenly before launching into an explanation of realms as stacked fabrics between which strings could be pulled and rewoven. Tessa followed the first part of his explanation but then the metaphor started to be mixed into the theory of magic conservation which he assumed they all understood. He forgot that not everyone had read every book he had. Tessa glanced at Jem who shrugged and sat back. Either Jem didn’t understand it either or didn’t think it was that important.

He grabbed her hand under the table and laced his fingers with hers. She smiled at him and squeezed back. Henry's explanation became background noise to Jem's thumb stroking the back of her hand. She tried to at least pretend to look at Henry but her attention kept coming back to Jem. She had spent most of the night curled up with him but still this touch was utterly distracting.

She hadn't meant to spend most of the night curled up in his bed but her recurring nightmare of Nate's death had left her sure that he hadn't been the only one who had died that day. The specifics had already been fading by the time she had stumbled up out of her bed but the dread wouldn't leave her until she had knocked on Jem's door and been able to touch him and prove to herself that he was fine. He had seemed worried and invited her in to sit with him. That had been all it was. But then she had fallen asleep on his bed.

She stopped herself from thinking through the morning and Will being there. She forced her attention back to Henry.  

"I can show you the test model but it's not working properly quite yet," Henry said.

Cecily looked like she was regretting asking after the project. Will whispered something in Welsh. Tessa didn't need to know the words to understand that it meant: “You did ask for him to explain.”

Henry left his books and papers spread across the library table and headed for the door without turning to see if anyone was following him. Jem and Will exchanged one of those looks that Tessa couldn't interpret and Jem shrugged in response to whatever it was that Will was asking and stood.

"It's going to be runes scrawled on a wall," Will complained from his chair.

"If it's not working properly does that mean it's working improperly? What might an improperly functioning portal do? I worry that he's going to break the law one day simply because he wasn't paying enough attention to what he was doing. What if he has a little demonic portal just sitting open in the crypt below the Institute?" Jem asked.

“Henry isn’t that stupid,” Tessa said.

“I’m not arguing that he’s stupid. I’m arguing that he lets his projects run away with him,” Jem said.

"We'd best check then," Will sighed.

They got up and followed Henry along in a little train. He was well ahead of them and as they passed the kitchen, Will stopped to steal a handful of biscuits. Bridget yelled after him and slammed the door behind him. He handed them out. They were still warm and when they reached the musty crypt full of Henry's equipment, Will handed one to Henry as well. Henry beamed at him and waved vaguely at what were indeed runes scrawled on the wall while he chewed on the biscuit.

Around his mouthful of food, he pointed out things about his portal. Jem asked questions that Henry was more than happy to answer but Tessa could hear the worry in Jem’s tone as he kept pushing for details. Henry wasn’t even watching him as he answered questions. Henry finished his cookie and crossed to the portal. He still held the spell book in one hand and checked it as he trailed off what he was saying. Jem tried to get his attention back with questions but Henry was peering at his runes on the wall and pulled a stele out of his pocket and added what looked like nothing more than squiggles to Tessa.

Jem was reading over the wall and seemed to have decided that it was indeed not a demonic portal. He smiled at Tessa, his worry fading away to curiosity and maybe just the tiniest hint of annoyance. Tessa reached out and took Jem’s hand again and squeezed his fingers. His fingers squeezed back and all of the witchlight lamps in the laboratory lit his face in a way that made his hair gleam almost white. It was Will who pulled her attention back to the real world.

“Henry, is it safe?” Will asked.  

“It’s still untested,” Henry said.

“Is that a no?” Will asked.

“Can we test it? How do you test a portal?” Cecily asked.

Will glared at her but she was ignoring him, creeping closer to the runes on the wall. She wore a pink day dress and had her hair pulled up off her neck in a neat swirl of curls. She looked like the picture of girlhood. Cecily was as bright a star as her brother but she burned with a different energy. Cecily had more joy in her. She could be quiet and serious but unlike Will, the sadness in her didn’t seem as permanently etched into her bones. When Will was happy, it was in spite of everything else. When Cecily was happy, she was just happy.

“I have these automaton parts and what should happen is that when one is placed in the portal opening, it will be pulled to its point of origin and then we will be able to follow it through to Mortmain’s factory,” Henry said.

“Is that something we want to do?” Jem asked.

“Knowing where it is would be a step towards knowing where he is,” Henry said.

“What if the automatons see the door in the wall and cross over and we have an Institute full of metal monsters. Again?” Will asked.

“It only goes one way.”

“I don’t think that’s as reassuring as you think it is,” Will said.

“What if he just ordered the parts from a regular supplier?” Cecily asked. Everyone glanced at her, “Well, nuts and bolts are nuts and bolts, why would he have special magic ones when he could just buy a box from the same factories that supply the carpet factories or the railroad manufacturers?”

“This is made of blood iron,” Henry said. “Blood iron is distilled from the blood of living things. It’s one of the rarest substances in the world. It is particularly well suited to holding magic spells. I have already separated out the regular nuts and bolts. These pieces come from specialized parts in the automatons that require that the magic be particularly strong. It’s a unique substance. It will be easy to track.”

Henry stood off to a side of the portal, still studying the collection of runes while he hefted a chunk of metal that wasn’t recognizable as a piece of an automaton. It was dull iron rather than the shiny bronze that made the outer bodies of most of the automatons that they had seen. The hunks of metal had been damaged in the destruction of the automaton and Tessa could see sword marks on the one that Henry was holding.

“But it’s just a wall,” Cecily said leaning in to poke at the solid brick in the space between the runes.

Henry shooed her back past the edge of the circle he’d drawn on the floor around the arch of runes and she scampered back with her face still full of interest. Tessa caught her eye and they shared a grin. Cecily’s excitement was contagious. Tessa had found most magic a little unsettling after her captivity with the Dark Sisters and it was nice to be reminded that it was magic and it was real and there was an excitement in that.

“Do not encourage her,” Will said to Tessa and she smiled a little wider.

Henry completed a last few runes on the edge of his portal. He must have left them out intentionally because as soon as they were finished the entire thing started to glow with a blue-white light that stung to look at. Tessa took a step back and Jem pulled her in closer to him.

It was pretty.

A blue white light lit every rune as though they were holes cut in a shadow screen. It was a little taller than Tessa was. Rounded and narrower than a doorway but big enough for a person to pass through. In the middle, the brick of the crypt’s wall started to blur and then vanish into a murky gray like storm clouds on the horizon. The gray gathered and darkened to a matte black that looked both like velvet and the darkest night.

It was striking but not as impressive or concerning as she’d thought it would be. Jem had been deeply concerned about it. Jem was still holding her hand and keeping her just a little bit behind him. She was busy thinking that she and Jem were skirting the line of propriety when Henry tossed the bit of metal into the space in front of the portal.

It hit the floor with a flat clunk.

Nothing else happened.

“Oh,” Cecily said.

Cecily took step forward to look at the hunk of iron again and it started to shiver. It shook like the ground it was on wasn’t steady even though the rest of the room was completely still. Will grabbed a hold of Cecily’s wrist and hauled her backwards, pushing her away from the portal as the runes glowed brighter.

“Interesting,” Henry said.

“What is it doing?” Jem asked.

“I suspect it is attempting to pull in the iron but perhaps it isn’t close enough now that the spell has been reduced a little by the addition of the stabilizers,” Henry started muttering to himself as he picked up another piece of metal and lobbed it closer to the wall. It clanged off the ground and started shaking more violently, rattling against the stone.

The room around them whistled like wind through chimneys though there the air was still. Cecily peeked around Will and when the metal chunk finally rattled itself up off the ground and was sucked into the portal with a whine, she whooped in celebration.

“Where did it go?” Cecily asked.

“Well, I’ll be,” Henry said staring at it.

“Let’s do another,” Cecily said, picking up another piece.

“No,” Will said.

He snatched it out of her hand and stepped out of range of her trying to grab it back. He stood on the edge of the circle and the other piece of metal that had been left in the path of the portal started to clang and clatter against the stone floor. Will spun to watch it. The portal glowed a little brighter and lit his face in unnatural blue light.

The ball of iron banged and bounced.

“Or perhaps the stabilizing runes didn’t weaken it at all,” Henry said frowning now.

That high pitch whine cut the air again and the little ball of metal was sucked into the portal just as the first one had been.

“Will,” Jem said a moment before the piece in his hand started to shake. The remaining bits on the table behind them started to vibrate as well, humming against the wooden table and making the glassware farther down rattle. The room was full of a chaotic buzz of noise. Cecily was asking questions about whether this was normal and Henry was ignoring her as he flipped his blueprints to another page.

Jem reached out and grabbed Will’s sleeve as the piece in his hand shook more violently. Will either couldn’t let go of it or was in too much shock to remember to try. The whining started and it shouldn’t have mattered. The piece of iron was no bigger than a penny dreadful novel, it should have been easy for Will to hold it but it yanked him a step into the circle.

The whining sound got louder.

Will swore but still didn’t let go.

“Drop it, now,” Jem said.

He stepped into the circle as well. He was pulling on Will but the metal was being drawn into the portal. Henry was yelling something and inching around the side to reach for the lines of the portal with his stele. He was going to turn it off, erase or redraw the runes or do something else but turn it off. Tessa kept an eye on him and willed him to work faster. This wasn’t safe.

A piece of the iron from the table was pulled into the air and sailed by Tessa, catching Will in the shoulder and making him yell before it flew into the dark space in the center of the portal. Jem had his fingers twisted tightly in Will’s sleeve and Tessa followed him a step closer. She wasn’t sure what she thought she could do but she wasn’t going to leave either of them alone against the glow and the black and th e flying pieces of metal. Another winged by her close enough that she felt the air rush along her cheek.

Someone was yelling but the whine was so loud as more and more of the pieces were sucked through that Tessa couldn’t tell who it was or what they were saying. The whine crested. She shut her eyes against the ringing in her ears and held tight to Jem’s elbow and another piece slammed past her, around her,everywhere as though the air itself was being sucked forward.

Suddenly, it was quiet.

Quiet and serene and cold.

Beside her, Will swore rather creatively.

“At least it isn’t an automaton factory,” Jem said.

“Your optimism is going to be the death of me,” Will said.

She opened her eyes expecting to see that Henry had shut down the portal somehow but they weren’t standing in the Institute at all. They were outdoors and they weren’t in London. Tessa spun, expecting to see the portal behind them like that they had passed through but behind them was more empty field covered in gray scrub grass.


	4. In the Cold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "hurr hurr gonna have an update schedule hurr durr gonna stick to it and update regularly hurr durr derp derp derp"  
> *side eyes myself*  
> Zero promises this time.  
> Here's another update though.

They stood in a wide empty space with a line of sparse trees to their left and a small dark wood building listing like a sinking ship in front of where they stood. Around them, in the scrubby grass were all the bits of metal from Henry's lab. They were scattered around in a haphazard arc as though thrown about by an angry child. Jem spun and looked behind them, expecting to see some evidence of the portal but there was nothing but more flat land and brown grass and the rise of a hill.

Will handed him a blade and they turned together in a slow circle. Tessa caught somewhere behind them. She stayed still and didn’t say a word. Will had taken a seraph blade from somewhere inside his suit jacket. He twirled it in his hand, still unlit. He’d given Jem the knife he usually carried in his boot. He had taken two blades to do research in the library. Jem would have scolded him for it but it seemed like clever planning given how their day was going.

“Possibly hell?” Will said.

“It’s awful cold for hell,” Jem said.

“Hell’s cold, Tess says so,” Will said.

“Dante says so,” Tessa said.

“Can’t argue with dead Italians. Still I doubt this is hell. Maybe a demon realm?” Will suggested in a conversational tone.

“Maybe but nothing has tried to kill us yet,” Jem said.

There was a skeletal forest to their right and a rise of hills behind it. Nestled in at the foot of the nearest hill was a small weather beaten cabin. It was made of logs and had wooden shingles over most of the roof. It had the look of something that the weather had long since beaten into submission. It had a small window with shutters that hung at broken angles. Once someone had called it home. It had little personal touches that could only mean someone had once loved the place. It had edging on the roof and remnants of paint on the door but it was long since abandoned. It could have been a century old and Jem wouldn’t have been surprised.

Will swore and dropped the sword.  

"Where are we?" Tessa asked.

"Not in Henry's lab," Will said.

"I did notice that much, I was gifted with both eyes and a brain," Tessa said.

"Were you?"

"As hilarious as you think you are, Mr. Herondale, now is perhaps not the right time."

"Hilarious and clever and devilishly handsome, don't forget all the very important details."

Tessa rolled her eyes at Will and stepped away from him. Jem pocketed the knife and tried to make sense of the place. By the sky, it was the same time here as it was in London. By the sky, it was also just another place on earth. Bright blue being rapidly overtaken by gray clouds. There was nothing there. No sense of magic or evil to twinge at his runes. Just a place. A field. Someplace cold. There were no identifying landmarks or clues but the cabin.

“We’re in the place that the iron comes from. Henry’s portal worked. It worked a little too well,” Jem said kicking a chunk of metal away from them. The dull gray stuff was supposed to be made with blood but maybe it was mined and then enchanted. He rubbed his forehead with his fingers. They needed more information and he had no idea how to find it.

“So we’re still in the world, our world?” Tessa asked.  

“Seems like it,” Jem said.

“Good,” she said then turned on her heel and started across the grass towards the little cabin. Her skirts flapped around her in an icy wind that picked up and she tucked her arms in around her body as she walked.

"Where are you going?" Will called.

"You both may be wearing boots but I'm wearing slippers and my feet are going to freeze, I'm going inside. We can figure it all out once we’re warm," she said.

Jem turned to look at the space where the portal should have been if it truly was a door. There was nothing. He ran his hands over the air but it was just air. There was no resistance to push at, no shimmer to hint at magic, not even any marks on the ground beyond the chunks of dull gray metal that had been pulled through with them. The magic had dropped them and moved on or faded away.

Jem swore at it softly in Chinese.

He was staring at empty space. He was staring at an empty field. Where were they?

“If there’s a family of wolves in there, she’s going to get eaten,” Will said nodding towards the cabin and Tessa. Jem let Will pull him across the grass to follow her. There wasn’t anything to be found at the portal site, anyways. Jem didn’t know enough about magic to make sense of it even if he did find some evidence. Warm was better than freezing in the open.

Tessa had to lean all her weight on the door to get it to groan and swing open and as she stepped inside the floor creaked as well. Jem hurried in after her but it didn't take more than a moment to realize there weren't any dangers hiding in the sparse corners. The cabin was a single room with a pot-bellied wood stove with a crooked stovepipe that stuck up through a hole in the roof that had partially fallen in so that a patch of gray sky was visible. The place was cold but dry and the wind whistled by the windows but didn't gust inside once Will pushed the door shut.

"Delightful place," Tessa said.

"And it isn't any warmer than it is outside. But if anyone lived here once, they’re long gone now," Will said.

He kicked the crate beside the stove and a moment later a collection of mice scurried out. Tessa skipped away from them, pulling her skirts away as they skittered for darker corners. Will ignored the mice and crouched to start building a fire from the old dry logs. He packed them into the stove as though he'd done it before, angling logs and smaller fragments of kindling into the space. He spoke as he worked.

"We've got two choices, we can either stay here and hope that Henry can safely reopen the portal and allow us to cross back," Will said digging in the wood bin, "Or we can attempt to walk to the nearest town and book our own passage back to London."

"Which direction do we walk in? It is high summer and this place is an icy wasteland which raises the question of just where the hell we are. Walking farther into the arctic circle is not going to help anything," Jem said.

Will started offering theories and Jem started shooting holes in them. They would do this until they managed to find a plan that would work. Will would throw out ridiculous ideas and more plausible ones and Jem would throw his own back. It was a good system. Usually they could do it fast, sometimes without even saying it all aloud but with Tessa here, by unspoken agreement, they talked it out so she could follow the train of thought.

Tessa had let them talk for a few moments before interrupting, “Do you really know how to navigate by the stars? Never mind, it doesn't matter. I can figure out where we are.”

She had only been half listening as she walked around the edges of the room, poking at the bed and carefully opening cabinets in case rodents came pouring out. Jem had been too busy trading plans with Will to pay her much attention. She stood by a small wardrobe in the far corner and held out a heavy winter coat like it was an explanation. Will raised his eyebrows and for a moment, Jem was as confused as he was.

Jem smiled at her when he figured it out. A second later, Will leaned against his shoulder and waved a hand at Tessa to continue.

"Go outside or at least turn around," she said.

"Why?" Will asked.

She held up the coat and shook it at him. It was designed for someone far broader than she was. She wasn't going to be able to change into that person while wearing a dress and corset. Will finally caught up to her plan and nodded as though he’d come up with it. Jem grabbed his shoulder and pulled him outside. The cabin had a little porch that didn't quite break the wind and sagged a bit at one side. It had a sad broken chair propped up against the rail beside an upside down wooden crate someone had been using as a side table.

Out across the empty field, dotted with chunks of automatons, the horizon disappeared into a white haze. They had arrived just as a storm was blowing in. The wind was still picking up and there were flakes of snow in it being carried ahead of the clouds. It was going to be a hell of a storm when it arrived.

"That's marvelous," Will said.

"At least we've got the cabin," Jem said.

"Until that blizzard buries it in and we starve to death."

"It's good that you've got a sense of optimism about this."

Will sighed and crossed his arms tightly over his chest and glared at the weather. Jem was paying too much attention to him today. The wrong kind of attention, the kind of attention that it was usually better to avoid. The tension in his shoulders, the set of his jaw, the way his mood shifted. There was analyzing William Herondale and then there was this. Jem was letting himself be fascinated by Will. He turned away and leaned on the rail of the porch. It put Will out of his line of sight. A small improvement.

Will had been snappy and had complained about everything under the sun since he’d come down to join them in the library.

Will had seemed so different over the last few weeks since his sister had arrived, like the walls were coming down and the person lurking underneath was coming out into the light. Jem had been the only one to see the echoes of that person for so long and now to see Will going out of his way to offer kindnesses to his sister or Charlotte or Sophie had been unsettling but glorious. Jem had been taking stock of it. Every little kindness he stored away to try and make sense of later.

The dark spot had been Tessa.

Will had refused to spend time in the same room as her unless there was no escape and even then, he hid himself away in the corners of rooms so he didn't have to so much as look at her. He hadn’t been cruel to her. He had just been indifferent. Jem had been giving her almost all of his attention but was that so wrong? They’d just become engaged. He wanted to sit with her, to fill in all the things he didn’t know about her, to memorize her smiles and her moods until he could understand her.

Jem wanted to gather them both up and sit down together. Will was the one who so adamantly would not allow that. Jem’s invitations were all declined. When he tried to orchestrate it by showing up in the drawing room with Tessa when he knew Will was in there reading, Will would just apologize and leave. Polite. Distant. Dismissive. Usually Will in a bad mood was like drizzle in London. Annoying but predictable and unavoidable. Jem had gotten used to being able to expect Will in a better temper. That the source of the mood was Tessa was unavoidably true but utterly inexplicable.

Will climbed up to perch on the rail beside where Jem was leaning and scowled out at the spot where they had come through. They watched the storm move towards them and the cold started to worm its way into Jem's joints. He ignored it. Cold was always worse than the warmth of summer but he was still fine. He rubbed his fingers together but the ache was still minor.

"How long until you need some more?" Will asked as though he was thinking the same thoughts. Jem quirked a smile.

"Two days, maybe three," Jem said.

Will swore once. He didn't look at Jem and Jem didn’t push the subject. He didn’t want to talk about it. When the door behind them creaked, he was grateful for the distraction. He spun to look at Tessa. She waved them inside. She wore the skirt from her gown and a flannel shirt that was far too big for her. It was a strange fashion choice and when Jem raised his eyebrows in silent question she shrugged.

"It was a lot of clothing to get back on. I can’t do those buttons by myself. Besides, this is warmer," she said.

Jem laughed at that. He didn't actually know how difficult it was to get a lady's gown on but he knew that her bodice had lines of tiny buttons on it that would have taken a long time to close. He had spent far too long that morning in the library considering those buttons. He spent far too much time on any given day thinking about the inconsequential details of everything related to Tessa Gray.

"The man who lives here doesn't speak English but there's a village over the hill, close enough to walk to the bakery and be home by luncheon. The next nearest town beyond that is far enough away that he never visited it after he arrived from somewhere south. His mother grew flowers but without words, I couldn’t make much more sense of those memories than that. He's a miner so there must be a port or a rail station to transport the ore to the cities, mustn't there?" she said.

"We'll head over the hill as soon as the snow let's up and find out," Will said.

He flopped down on the bed and it creaked loudly in protest. He thumped the headboard with the heel of his hand and it groaned. He shot Jem a look. The furniture in the place looked like it was all about to fall apart and everything was dusty. It had been a long time since anyone had been here to do any mining. They were probably going to find a ghost town over that hill. Jem nodded but didn't give voice to the thought. There was no reason to say it until they were sure. Tessa would worry and he didn't want her to have to worry.

"What do we do until then?" she asked.

"Try to plug the hole in the ceiling and the windows before the storm gets worse," Will said.

That turned out to be far more difficult than Jem had expected. They had limited materials and none of them had any experience in construction. They did, in the course of searching for tools, find a collection of dry stores that had been kept in sealed jars and were untouched by the mice. Tessa made a paste of flour and clear if not perfectly clean water from the rain barrel and used it seal squares of the curtains she had cut up over the cracked glass on the windows. She explained that they had used newspaper back when she lived in New York but she thought the curtain fabric would serve the same purpose.

"Why did you need to put paper over your windows?" Jem asked.

Will shot him a look and he caught the reason for it a moment too late. He had known in an abstract way that Tessa had grown up rather poor. He’d never considered that that might require pasting newspapers to windows. He’d never really considered the details of it at all. He regretted the tactless comment but rather than looking offended, Tessa looked thoughtful.

“My parents didn't have much savings when they died. Though there was a little, enough to pay off the apartment, we lived off the money my aunt and later Nate could earn. Aunt Harriet took in washing and mending and sometimes took other jobs though she rarely described them. I suspect that they were as a domestic or a laundress and she thought that was a point of shame. I helped with the mending and Nate, eventually, took jobs himself. Aunt hoped he would make a name for himself as a clerk and eventually get promoted. It never happened. He started gambling when he was fifteen and drinking not long after," she said.

"Oh," Jem said. His mind was scrambling for something better to say than that.

"We never suffered for food, I had enough to buy myself books sometimes but the more expensive things, things like new windows, were rarer," she said with a shrug. "Besides, New York gets cold. Even houses with fine windows and thick carpets get cold in the winter. Don’t go looking so sorry about it, the Institute is draftier than our apartment was with all those old corridors and stone walls."

"The Institute is bloody cold even in summer," Will added, breaking up the flow of the conversation.

He was balanced above Jem on a wooden chair. Jem had some pieces from a cabinet they’d broken in a pile beside him and was passing them up to Will to attempt to fit together in the hole in the roof. The fact that they were using rusty nails from the demolished cabinet and the hilt of Will’s boot knife to try and attach the pieces together had made it a difficult task. Will’s mood was not improved by it.

He had snow on his eyelashes from keeping his face turned up to the hole. He blinked and shook them away and rolled his shoulder.

“Are you injured, you idiot?” Jem asked.

“One of the automaton bits hit me in the shoulder, it’s hardly an injury,” Will said.

“Get off the chair and put on a iratze,” Jem said.

“I’m almost done, let’s keep it from snowing inside and then we can fuss over my bruise,” Will said.

He turned his attention back to the poor construction job he was doing. He had to squint against the gusts of wind and snow that slipped in around the pieces of wood. The wind howled around the building and even the uncovered windows showed nothing of the outside world.

“Do you think they’ll try and reopen the portal?” Tessa asked.

“I don’t even know if they can but if it’s possible, I hope they wait. If someone came through in that, we’d never find them,” Will said glancing at her and then at the snow.

They all took a moment to watch it against the glass before they went back to work to try and make the cottage warm enough that they would survive the storm.


	5. Space Considerations

The hole in the roof was a messy patchwork job that Will didn't think was going to survive the wind but he was out of ideas how to make it better. Jem had pointed out that his plan to stuff the curtains into the remaining holes would just set the whole thing ablaze if they wanted to keep the fire banked for the night. Keeping the stove burning was more important than keeping those stray flakes of snow from falling through the bad spots.

Tessa had made rock hard biscuits out of the paltry dry stores they had found and they'd ate them along with the vinegary pickles and a can of fruit that might have been peaches. Will was already sick of the food and this was the only real meal they had had in this place. He sat up on top of the cabinet by the kitchen window, close enough to the stove that his toes were warm but he was looking out at the storm. It was starting to get dark and between the sinking sun and the thick flakes, he couldn't see much of anything.

He was turning over plans for how they would get out of there.

He was also ignoring Jem and Tessa.                

They had been laughing and talking in low voices over where they sat on the edge of the bed. It was all perfectly proper but Will had had too much of them already today and his nerves needed a break. He'd already used the excuse of finding the wood pile to go outside for a few minutes but with a stack of wood brought in and nothing but snow out there, he had no other excuses. Being with them and close enough to see the way their attention caught on each other was going to break any remaining pieces of his heart.

He found himself desperate for the same thing he was always desperate for after enduring the two of them being so unbearably in love. He wanted to go find Jem and lean his head into the crook of Jem’s neck and complain while Jem mocked him and whispered gentle reminders to be less self-centered and mean. He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t ask Jem to pet his hair and offer him reasonable perspective on this.

Jem was too busy being stupidly happy and Will couldn’t drag that happiness down. He wouldn’t. Jem deserved this kind of joy and so did she. Will just wished he didn’t have to listen to it. Tessa was going over the things she’d learned from the cabin’s prior occupant again and Jem was asking questions. They weren’t even flirting. They were just talking and Will was choking on it.

"We're going to be out of light soon," Tessa said a little louder. “You brought along two swords and not a witchstone?”

"I did not. Alas, we won't be able to play charades by the light of the stove grate alone. Our evening plans are ruined,” Will said.

Tessa let out a laugh that physically turned Will around to look at her. His walls depended on distance. He needed more distance to keep himself together. He simply couldn't do it when she was so damn close. The cabin was small enough that it would only take two steps for him to reach her. Just get down off the cabinet, round the stove, and then what? He stopped his imagination from presenting him with any possibilities for what he could do if Tessa was his.

"You're welcome to try, but I'm going to bed," Jem said.

Oh.

Will had so carefully controlled his rampant imagination that he had managed to not consider that problem throughout their afternoon of failed home repairs and terrible cooking. The bed was large enough to allow for everyone but that didn't mean that Will thought he could survive that. He caught a very small glance from Tessa that was just as alarmed. He could see the moment when the same thought crossed through her mind. She didn't look at all comfortable with it.

"I was there this morning, it was not ideal but this isn't going to be a surprise and suggesting anyone sleep anywhere but in the bed is madness and will lead to frostbite and death by freezing so don't, please," Jem said.

Even getting ready for bed was awkward. Getting changed in a room that small with other people and very little floor space meant a lot of backs turned and questions about whether or not one was done yet. The miner who had lived in the cabin had enough extra clothing for them to borrow but none of it fit anyone. He was shorter and broader than any of the three of them so ankles were exposed and makeshift belts were needed to keep borrowed pajamas in place.

Tessa, by virtue of being a little shorter, had gotten the only set of actual pajamas in the place which was a single piece of flannel clothing in a faded colour that seemed to dream of being orange but didn't quite make it past beige. It was too big in the shoulders to the point that the neckline kept slipping around and she had to tug it back into place while blushing. She wore it along with gray woolen socks that wouldn't stay up.

If Will had thought that the waking up beside her in the morning or the constant gentle hum of her and Jem's conversations around him all day was going to be the worst part of this little expedition, he had sorely underestimated the impact of Teresa Gray in ill-fitting men's pajamas. She sat up on the bed with her back to the them, facing the wall and braiding her hair while they changed. Jem smiled at her without saying anything until Will poked him and made a face. Distracting Jem had been more about distracting himself and it only partially worked.

Jem was still smiling when he sat down on the bed beside Tessa and pinched the fabric at her shoulder between his fingers, "This is cute."

"This is a hideous sack made of orange wool, the only redeeming quality is that I am warmer in this than I was in my dress," Tessa said.

"And yet, you look lovely."

"Are you flirting with me?"

"Always, Miss Gray."

Will considered the mature response. If anyone asked, he could honestly say that he had considered the mature response for about thirteen seconds before he made a gagging sound. Tessa turned and glared at him. They were almost out of daylight and the single miserable little candle Jem had found in the drawer by the bedside table was about all the light they had left. Tessa's expression was still visible in the warm glow.

"They would probably write treacle poetry about the two of you, the kind that Jessamine likes to read, with far too many metaphors about flowers and descriptions of eyes," Will said.

"I wonder what kind of poetry people would write about you?" Tessa asked.

"Something bold and erudite. A great and epic piece," he said.

"Oh really? Here I thought it would be something rude and bawdy," she said.

"I can't tell if you two are antagonizing one another or if this is in good fun," Jem said.

“I’m utterly serious,” Will said.

“You’re utterly ridiculous,” Tessa corrected.

“As delightful as this is, if you two could snipe at each other quietly, I’m going to sleep,” Jem said.

He flopped down into the bed on the side farther from the fire and pulled Tessa down with him. She laughed and let him tuck her into the blankets so she lay at his side. He had left the extra space on the far side of her. Will was going to argue. He wanted to argue. He wanted to demand that somehow he not end up tucked in beside Tessa again but he didn’t know how to word it without saying things he didn’t want to say.

The blankets were already starting to warm as the three of them figured out how to arrange the sheets and quilts so that they were all as covered as possible. Tessa was good natured about it all and Jem laughed and smirked as though he found it all very entertaining. Will didn’t bother trying to pretend he wasn’t uncomfortable. He was too tired for it. He lay down with his back to her and his face towards the stove. He watched the orange glow of the banked fire through the grate and emptied his thoughts.

Will wasn’t touching her but he fell asleep very aware of the warmth of her body.


	6. In the Morning

Tessa started to stretch but she was surrounded something warm and heavy. He was pretty much lying on top of her and she could feel him breathing against her neck. A wave of claustrophobia hit her but before it could become panic about being trapped someone said, "He'll do that to anyone, I suppose."

"Jem?" she turned away from the weight of Will curled around her to find him propped up on his elbow looking down at her with a smile. He looked pale against the dark woolen blankets and she reached out to touch his face in part to see if he was warm and in part just to touch him. He kissed her palm and she let the panic go. Relaxation was still out of reach but at least she could breathe now.

"You forgot where we were," he said.

"I remember now. Does he always hold on this tight?" she asked.

"Usually. With Will it's either this or he ignores you entirely and you might as well have the bed to yourself and there isn't any way to predict which you will get," Jem said.

"He's still asleep?" she asked.

"Yes, if he wasn't he'd be backpedaling and falling out of bed when he realized how close he is to you," Jem said.

"He's a little close," she said and her voice came out as tight and uncomfortable and she felt.

Will's arms were around her and he was holding on. His heart beat was a slow, even rhythm that she could feel against her ribs where his chest pressed into her back. He had wrapped one knee over hers so that their legs were locked together. She tried to ignore the fact that before she had tried to move, the closeness had felt safe and comfortable. Now her heartbeat was picking up and she wanted free.

She didn't want to carry the knowledge of what Will felt like pressed against her. She didn't want to carry the knowledge that he could be like this. Needy and warm and gentle. She couldn't stomach any of it. Her heart was going to shatter each time this memory came back.

"Don't worry, he's not going to hurt you and it's freezing out there, we're best to stay here a little longer," Jem said petting her hair back from her forehead. She couldn't relax but she didn't fight the hold. She wasn't going to be able to force Will to let go of her even if she did struggle. She kept her attention on Jem who was smiling at her.

"I don't understand why you look so happy," she said.

"I like waking up beside you," he said.

"Your parabatai is wrapped around me like an extra blanket," she said.

"There's something endearing about that as well."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"Will pushes everyone away. I had thought he didn't care for your company at all but instead I find that he trusts you rather deeply. I am glad of that."

"You think he trusts me?"

"He's fallen asleep with you twice now. There are people, a needlessly long list of people, with whom he will not relax enough with to sit in the same room as them and read a book. Will asleep is Will with his walls down and it is a very rare thing to be allowed to see. He trusts you more than he'll admit when he's awake. To be quite honest, it's probably best if you don't mention it to him."

Jem threaded his fingers through her hair as he spoke in a low voice. He wasn't pinning her down like Will was but he was close enough that she was aware of his body and the bitter sugar smell of his skin. He kept talking, offering to help pry her loose from Will if she needed it and she found herself starting to calm down as they spoke. She readjusted as much as Will's arms would allow so that she and Jem were nose to nose and he was all she could see. If she didn't think about it, if she just pretended it didn't mean anything, if she could see it the way that Jem did, it was comforting to be surrounded like this.

When Will finally woke up, he did it by pressing closer as he shook himself back into the waking world. Tessa tensed all over again, all of Jem's efforts in calming her down flew away in an instant. Will lifted his head and the little corner between her throat and her shoulder immediately felt cold at the loss. He muttered something that didn't sound like words. She twisted as he blinked at the world and Tessa's heart stuttered and went sideways. He looked soft and a little bit happy and that expression was going to kill her.

"Does he really behave like this with you?" Tessa asked Jem trying to put some distance between herself and this moment. Maybe if she made it a joke, she would able to survive it.

"What?" Will's voice wasn't clear.

"Admittedly it looks a little different when his hands are all over a young woman but it’s about the same," Jem said.

Jem was still amused. Tessa held onto that as Will pushed himself up into a sitting position, pushing back the blankets and letting a wave of frigid air into the space. Tessa immediately jumped back away from the cold and into Jem's side of the bed. He pulled her into his arms and then grabbed Will's shirt and yanked him back down as well.

Will looked utterly unbalanced. Jem had a hold of him and Will’s body language said that he wanted to push away but he was staying frozen over her. He was back in the tangle of blankets but he was trying very hard not to touch her. He was failing. Tessa was both grateful for the effort and wishing that he would come back and lie down again.

"It's cold," Jem said as though it was an explanation.

"If I didn't know better, I would have thought you wanted to make this a regular occurrence," Will said.

"There are worse ways to wake up," Jem said.

He hadn't let go of Will until that moment. He had held Will close against Tessa's body as though it really was a regular occurrence and not wildly inappropriate. Will drew back but didn't sit up again. The space in the blankets was still warm. Tessa stayed close to Jem and said nothing. She had no idea what would come out of her mouth if she opened it. Will sank back against the mattress. He was close enough that she was aware of his warmth but not so close that she could actually feel him. It was almost more disconcerting.

"How long have we got?" Will asked.

"This is a nice moment, let it just be a nice moment," Jem said.

"Fine, I want breakfast, I don't suppose this foul place has grown a maid along with the snow drifts," Will said.

"I think there are still biscuits from yesterday, they were terrible but they’re food," Tessa said starting to pull away from Jem.

"No, I'll do it, you two cuddle or whatever it is you do," Will said waving off her offer.

Before she could argue, he slipped away and out into the cold. Jem pulled her back into the blankets and in against his chest. She tucked her nose in against his collarbone and tried to reorganize her thoughts. She was embarrassed by how horrible the biscuits had been. She regretted not using the moments of touch to play with Will’s hair. She regretted wanting to do that at all. Jem’s nearness swung between comforting and exhilarating in ways she couldn’t quite quantify or make sense of.

Will was back to being silly when he sat back down with cups of water and some of Tessa's terrible biscuits from the day before. He'd got the fire up and while the room wasn't warm yet, it was better than it had been. Sticking her nose out of blankets was tolerable but she didn’t really want to brave the cold just yet.

Will sat up against the headboard on Jem's side of the bed and chewed on the biscuit. Chewed hard because it had the consistency of cardboard and about as much flavour. He was wearing a large woolen sweater with a pattern at the collar and a hole at the elbow and his hair was pushed back from his brow and there was still an imprint of the blankets on his cheek that hadn’t faded. His feet were tucked under the blanket, against Jem probably.

"This is a little like Christmas morning, isn't it?" Will said.

"How so?" Jem asked.

"Snowy hills, gathered around the fire, having breakfast together? I will admit that without Cecily jumping on top of everyone demanding to empty her stocking, it loses something and we should really have brought in some pine or cedar boughs," Will said.

"We have nothing but rocky biscuits and it is July," Tessa pointed out.

She pulled herself out of Jem's arms and sat up to take one of the biscuits and knock it against the plate to point out how terrible it was. Baking had never been her strong suit and she wasn't sure she'd gotten the ingredients right and they hadn't had butter. Jem didn't get up. He kept an arm draped over her and rested his cheek against her thigh. He didn't seem to care that Will was sitting right there and Will was doing a very good job of pretending that he didn't care either.

Maybe he didn't. Tessa couldn’t tell. Maybe everyone else was perfectly content except for her. She was jumpy and on edge because this was not appropriate.

"Food is food and I’m going to eat them all unless you take one now," Will said holding out the plate.

"Grab me one for later," Jem mumbled without raising his head. He didn't sound sick, just tired, but Tessa reached down to pet his hair and check his temperature. It seemed normal. Will caught her doing it but didn't comment. Instead he crossed his ankles and gestured out at the single room cabin like it was some sort of palace and he was a tour guide.

"Snow makes anything feel like Christmas even being stranded in an icy wasteland. We just need some candy canes," Will said.

"You have never been much of a Christmas person. I do believe you refused to even attend the ball last year claiming it dull and unnecessary since Shadowhunters don't attend church," Jem said without raising his head.

"Both those things are true but it was different when I was a child. It's strange how much I had forgotten of my childhood until Cecily started violently dredging it up. She's constant. Do you remember this? And do you still do that? And on and on," Will said.

The words were almost mocking but his tone was different, as though each word had more weight.

"So, tell me about Christmas in Wales," Tessa said.

“You first, tell me about Christmas in New York,” Will said.

Tessa chewed on her biscuit and tried to pick the pieces of her childhood that would make for a good story. Jem was doodling little patterns on her knee or maybe he was marking fingering patterns for the violin, she didn’t know but it was taking too much of her attention.  

“We always went to the parish dinner. Aunt Harriet would help prepare the food and I would go along with her. It was my favourite part. Even as a child when all we did was stir things or fetch water. When I got older I would peel and cut vegetables or simply watch over the stove. It was simple but I liked the bustle of the kitchen, all the neighbourhood ladies working together. The dinner was open to everyone and we often served poor families that wouldn’t have been able to have turkey or ham otherwise,” she said.

“Did you make biscuits?” Will asked.

Tessa glared and he took another bite of his with an apologetic smile.

“We had goose, I never helped prepare it though. My mother taught my sisters how to bake and I got pulled into that lesson but I never did much else in the kitchen,” Will said.

“You know how to bake?” Tessa asked.

“I learned how to make cookies once when I was eight,” he said.

“Then you make the next round of biscuits!”

“They’ll be worse than yours.”

“There is nothing that could be worse than these biscuits. These biscuits are terrible.”

“They’re fine,” Jem said.

“They’re not, they’re embarrassing,” Tessa said.

“Mine would be worse. We could have a competition. Like at a county fair,” Will said.

Jem laughed and, ever the peacemaker, interrupted their argument. “I never celebrated Christmas. My father didn’t hold with mundane traditions like that. My mother held very few mundane habits herself but there were a few Chinese festivals that my mother’s family participated in. The bringing of trees indoors and hanging mistletoe and all the rest was all a little strange when I came to London.”

“Does the Institute have a Christmas tree?” Tessa asked.

“Oh yes, and a ball. It’s all very mundane. Most people from Alicante think we’re quite backwards and silly for it,” Will said.

“It’s a nice tradition,” Jem said. “The Shanghai Institute always celebrated for the Moon Festival and the New Year. I don’t think it wise to allow ourselves to live too far separated from the mundanes. It is our responsibility to protect them but there is no value in forgetting that we are as they are. We are human. We share the turning of the seasons and the celebrations of family and community.”

“But the Shadowhunters don’t hold to any faith,” Tessa said.

“No, but we can still honour those that do,” Jem said.

“My mother would very politely suggest that you a heathen for saying that and then try and make you attend mass,” Will said.

“Aunt Harriet would also insist upon church but she wouldn’t be polite about that assertion,” Tessa said with a laugh.

“In the strictest definition, I suppose I am a heathen,” Jem said with a smile.

He finally pulled himself up to sit beside them and they shared memories of winters gone by. Tessa had never heard Will talk so candidly about himself and his childhood before. He never mentioned Ella but he told stories about Cecily and the time he had fallen off the roof of an outbuilding and broken his leg. Jem was all laughter and little prodding questions that kept the conversation going.  

“We’re going to need more firewood if we’re to make it through the day,” Will said and they finally had to drag themselves from bed. Tessa resented the break in the warmth and the nearness and getting up and getting dressed was a reminder that what they had been doing was inappropriate and ill-advised.


	7. Footprints in the Snow

Jem stepped out onto the porch outside the cabin and stretched. Less than 24 hours since he had last had a dose of the yin fen and he could already feel the twinges of pain. His fingers and his shoulders were hinting at aches to come and Will's words about how long they had echoed in his head. He pushed them all away and took a moment to enjoy the snow. The crisp whiteness and the great expanse of it. He wanted to be home in a city but he couldn't deny that this was beautiful.

He wore borrowed boots that he had had to cinch tight around his ankle with extra leather strings they had found in a collection of trapping gear. His feet almost fit in the sole of the boot but they flared out to fit a much wider leg. His foot slipped around as he hopped off the porch and he was glad he did not have to travel far with the damn things. When the headed out toward civilization, he was going to have to pack the boots with extra cloth or he'd just rub blisters into every inch of skin.

He didn't have to go that far now. He just had to go around the house to the woodpile and pull some logs loose from the snow. Jem wasn't sure what they would do if the firewood was rotted through. Tessa hadn't been able to tell how long ago the cabin had been inhabited. She struggled to learn anything from the mundane's memories because of the language barrier. It was a limitation on her ability that Jem had not considered before.  

He made it around to the stack of wood beneath a leaning overhang on the west side of the building and found that at least it was full. He picked up a piece of wood and flipped it around a few times. It didn't seem to be rotted but what did he know about wood? Hopefully Will or Tessa had some idea how you could tell if wood was dry enough to burn. Will had brought in logs the night before but maybe the snow had ruined them?

He picked up a few logs and tucked it under his arm and headed back around the house. He threw the first load up over the edge of the railing so it landed on the porch with a series of loud bangs. He heard Will swear from inside the house but didn't wait to hear the full details. He turned and went back to the woodpile for another load and repeated the process.

“Are you trying to raise all of hell, you maniac?” Will called out the door.

“You’re being an old lady,” Jem said.

“Get off my porch!”

Jem laughed as he went back around the building for more wood.

There were no sounds in this place beyond those they made themselves.

No sounds of a village but perhaps it was too far. No sounds of animals but perhaps they were all asleep for the winter. Jem listened to the whoosh and thunk of his boots in the snow and let his thoughts linger on the feeling of his muscles working as they were supposed to. That was why he had demanded to be the one who made this little outing. There was a ticking clock on how long his body would continue to work the way he wanted it too. The illness was there on the horizon and he wanted to stretch out this good period, to store away each good memory before they were gone.

If they could make the trip quickly, it would simply be a matter of a bad few days before they got home. Jem was looking forward to leaving. The faster they could book passage on a railway out of this icy place the sooner they would make it home. He didn’t relish the idea of spending too much time making Tessa worry over his health. They just needed to get home.

He turned and leaned against the side of the house before he picked up another load of wood and stared out at the snow. The sunshine was bright and sharp and a little eddy of powdery snow was picked up by a breeze and curled down the hill.

Beautiful.

Deadly.

It was barren and icy but it was worth stopping to look at.

Something caught his attention.

He squinted to be sure it wasn't a trick of the light.

There were patterns in the snow.

Now that he was looking, he could pick them out. He had stayed close to the side of the house where the snow had blow away around the shape of the building but out in the deeper snow the pattern was different. He stepped out towards the change in the perfect white blanket. At first, it was easy to imagine that they were just left by the little gusts of wind coming off the hill but as he got closer, they were too even for that.

The snow was marred by paths that crisscrossed one another, that traveled in lines and then looped back again. They fanned out and then drew in. It wasn't even or geometric. It was a tangle of mismatched paths but it certainly wasn't caused by wind. Jem edged around the house. The paths surrounded them, sometimes coming closer to the building on the sides where the snow had drifted against the walls.

Footprints.

Fine and small, like bird prints. Wide spread toes, each print no bigger than the end of his finger. There were too many for them to have all been made by the same individual. There had been hundreds of them. Jem looked to the sky first. If there were that many birds flying around, shouldn't they have heard them or seen them? The sky was spotless and empty. He frowned up at it and listened harder but there was nothing. The world was empty. A flock of nocturnal birds perhaps?

Jem turned and headed back for the front door. His firewood project was forgotten.

"I need to show-" Jem said as he opened the door and then stopped.

Will was sitting on a chair beside the fireplace and across the table from him was a blond man in his forties with a round face and alert brown eyes. When the stranger looked up, it fell into place, he could see some piece of her personality looking back at him and she was still wearing the ugly orange pajamas, but for a moment he had forgotten what Tessa could do.

"We're trying to figure out a map for the village over the hill," Will said.

"There are footprints in the snow," Jem said and Will's eyes widened. Jem hurried on with an explanation: "Birds I think, but a lot of them and they're all clustered around the house."

"That's just what this little holiday in the country needs, for nature to be behaving strangely," Will said with a note of annoyance in his voice.

His moment of alarm had passed. Jem couldn't for the life of him explain why the footprints had made him so nervous. There was something eerie about seeing only one bit of evidence of life in this place. There had been no rabbit prints, no howling wolves in the distance, no specs of birds flying high above. They might have been alone in the world except for these twisting and turning tracks.

But he was a city boy and always had been so perhaps he didn't know what was or was not normal for birds and nature and animal tracks in the snow. A pair of tracks from wagon wheels cutting through the freshly fallen snow on a London morning wouldn't have made him nervous even if the wagon itself was not in sight. He brushed off the sense of unease. The place was just strange to him in all its details, not just the strange swarm of birds.

Jem finished up his chore and leaned all the wood up against the wall. He came in and stood near the stove, warming his fingers and watching Tessa get more frustrated with the change and how little information she could get from her change. The twist of annoyance on her face was purely her from the set of her lips to the frown line between her eyebrows. Jem looked at the unfamiliar face and saw only Tessa.

“It’s so hard to get information, the words jumble everything up. I don’t even know what language he speaks,” Tessa said.

"I'm going to go up to the village with that much," Will said.

"I-" Jem started.

"Are going to stay here," he turned and pointed at Tessa, "and so are you."

"You're going to need a translator," she argued.  

"All I need is to look around and see if there is a port or a train station. I don't need a translator, I'm not even going to take off my glamour. I'm just going to go and look around. Strange men appearing from the wilderness will cause more trouble than good. They will think I am a vision of glorious god-like beauty-" Will's tone hadn't changed from his serious explanation but as soon as he used the word glorious, Jem was standing and picked a bit of snow off one of the logs and threw it at the side of Will's head.

Will ducked around it and whirled on him. His expression now that he was facing away from Tessa said something else though. An offer. He wasn't striking off into the snow on his own for a lark or because he thought no one else could handle it. He was offering Jem and Tessa, a little bit of time to be alone together.

Any arguments Jem might have had for tagging along evaporated.

"Faithless traitor," Will said rubbing his head as though there was snow in it.

"Take your glorious god-like beauty and get out of my cabin," Jem said.

Will bowed and Jem lobbed another bit of snow at him. This one hit him while his head was down and he came up swearing and Jem just laughed at him. He scoffed but he was smiling as he turned to go get one of the coats from the cabinet. Behind him, Tessa was Tessa again and she glanced between them as though she could tell they had been having silent conversations but couldn't tell what they had said.

"Let him go, he's a stubborn bastard when he gets a thought in his head," Jem said.

“What if it’s dangerous?” she asked.

“It’s a mundane mining village with a single shop. If I can’t handle that, I should be stripped of my runes and dumped in the Thames for the fish” Will said.

“Is it safe to be separated? What if another storm blows in?”

“You are borrowing worry. If it storms, I will stay in town until it passes. I have glamour and years of combat training my side, Miss. Gray. Don’t worry about it. Stay here. Have a morning off. Make more biscuits. I’ll be back sooner than you want me to be,” he said.

“Be safe,” she said.

“I will.”

Jem had made his way over to stand with Tessa and over her head he mouthed the words, “Get out of my cabin,” again and Will finished buttoning his coat and did as he was told.


	8. Worries

Jem leaned against the window and looked out at the snow. Tessa came to stand beside him and followed his gaze up the hill. Will was already gone out of sight. The snow was blinding under the sunlight. Tessa had never thought that snow could be so white. She knew it was white but in New York, it had quickly become brown and gray under the trod of horses and boots and buckets of washing water thrown out into the sewer grates. The whiteness never lasted long, often it was gray and slushy before the storm was even over. Here it was whiter than paper or silk gloves. Pristine and blinding.

"You're worried about him," she said to Jem.

"He's stubborn," Jem said.

"Well, yes," she said.

Jem laughed, "I worry that he will try something unreasonable to get us home sooner."

"We need to get back to London as quickly as possible," she said with a look at him. He glanced over at her, he was leaning with his shoulder against the frame. The shrug was only one shoulder and it was the kind of gesture she would have expected from Will rather than from him. The moment of silence stretched and she realized she was seeing Jem with his walls down. Jem was always polite and proper and careful. Right now, he was nervous and worried and had his arms crossed tightly over his chest.

He was watching the trail of Will’s footprints through the snow as though they had something to say.

“Sometimes I’m surprised again by it,” she said.

“Surprised by what?”

“How much you love each other. I know it but I don’t always get to see it.”

“You expect Will to talk about his feelings?”

“No but you’re just as quiet on the matter.”

“Sometimes I feel like Will is a reflection of a piece of myself, of the person I might have been if I had let the anger have me. I was angry once. I spent a long time in the Silent City as the Brothers tried to rid my body of the poison. I was angry. I chose to let the anger go and to live the years I had left in the image of the person my parents might have wanted me to be. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t willing to give up on him even when he’s awful.”

Jem fell quiet. It wasn’t what she was expecting him to say and Tessa turned to watch him as he spoke. He was still looking at the snow and the place where Will had disappeared from view.

“And now, after all this time, he’s a piece of me. A reflection maybe but also just a piece of the person I became. Who I am now and who I could ever be is tied up in William Herondale. I love him and I sometimes want to strangle him and feed him to wolves but I still love him. Even on those days.”

"Will is going to be fine. He will go over the hill, have a look around, bring us back some bread from the bakery on the main street. Every village has a bakery on their main street," Tessa said.

"I do not want either of you to put your lives in danger for mine," Jem said.

"No one is in danger," she said a little more sharply than she had intended.

Jem straightened then, coming back into himself and the person she was used to him being. A kind smile, his eyes trained on her face, his hands stretching out to take hers. Soft and polite and just the way she thought he naturally was but watching it slide into place made her frown. He was covering up his deeper emotions, burying his fears and his own worries so that he could calm hers. Was he afraid that they wouldn't be able to get home in time? Was he already starting to feel the lack of the drug? How long did he have before his health started failing?

"Jem," she said.

He leaned in and kissed her before she could ask that rush of questions. She held his gaze. She had thought of him once as being the beautiful of a winter morning but the winter outside was harsh and Jem was nothing like that blinding cold, he was the soft warm mornings and safe places, not the howling wind from the night before.

He was also making a request without saying a word. For once the silent conversation wasn’t happening between him and Will and leaving her in confusion. This she understood. This was meant for her.

Please don’t ask about my health, please.

She nodded.

She wouldn't ask, not now, not yet, they could pretend a little while longer. There would be time for plans and worries once they knew what was over the hill. They couldn't plan for the difference between a train journey and a journey by sled until they knew what was in the village.

"Go get a hat, I want to show you something," he said.  

 

Tessa stood with Jem and looked out at the bird prints. Will had walked through them leaving a messy channel through the snow and there was a little bit of wind that had started to smooth them away. Tessa wrapped her arms around herself and frowned. There was something uncanny about it but nothing she could put her finger on. A swarm had landed in the night, probably looking for food and then left.

"They're just little birds, birds travel in flocks, it's nothing to worry about," Tessa said pointing out the size of the footprints. She crouched down to look at them but the wind had already started to obscure them. Just marks left by birds.

"I'm just uncomfortable being so far from home, I think," Jem said. "Animals behave according to their own rules. I don’t know them.”

“Neither do I,” Tessa said.

He took her hand and pulled her back towards the cabin. She was glad of it. Even bundled into a borrowed coat, she was starting to feel like her nose would fall off if she didn't get out of the cold soon. Inside the cabin, Jem pulled off the wool hat she wore and ran his fingers through her hair to smooth it back down.

It frizzed up. Static electricity from the wool hat made it stick to his fingers and making him laugh as he tried to get the strands to release him. Tessa blushed and stepped around him, shedding the jacket and boots as she went.

"I'm sorry, you have to see me when I'm such a mess," Tessa said waving a hand at her hair and her the outfit she was wearing. She had never worn anything like this and none of it was in good repair and she should have put back on her own dress. It wasn't as warm but it at least was appropriate. No one wanted a fiancée who dressed like a miner but perhaps the voice whispering that in her head belonged to Jessamine rather than someone rational. Freezing in summer cotton would hardly be something Jem approved of.

"I like it when your hair attempts to stage an escape from your head but you must treat it terribly to make it run so far," Jem said.

She laughed at that and it broke some of her embarrassment.

"Yours isn't any better," she said with a nod at his hair which was finer than hers and was short enough that the static cling made some pieces stick straight up. She reached out and stopped short of touching him. The shyness was silly, hadn't they spent the night together? What was touching his hair after sleeping with her head on his shoulder? But her flutter of nerves wasn't listening to her logic.

"When we get back to London, I am going to buy you a nice wool hat of your own," Jem said.

"I shan't wear it, it will ruin my hair!"

"It would keep your ears warm."

"Once we're back home, I don't intend to spend so much time out in the snow."

"That's a shame. Your cheeks get all pink in the cold."

He reached out and ran the back of his fingers along her cheek. Her nerves fluttered again but it wasn't the same kind of shyness. This was something else. She pressed her lips together and let her eyes slide away from his gaze then back again. She bit her lip but that didn't help her clear her thoughts. Someone had moved closer.

"The blushing is your fault, we can hardly blame the weather," she said.

"Do I often make you blush?" he asked.

"Often enough," she said.

"Would a kiss make it better or worse?"

"Better, always better."

He leaned in and kissed her. 


	9. Together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally this chapter wasn't in the story but when I decided to bump the rating for something that won't happen for like 80 000 more words, I decided to go back and rescue this from the "extra scenes" file and put it back into the published version.

Jem leaned into the kiss and Tessa wrapped her arms around his neck to hold him close. Her hair was clinging to her cheeks and his and he kept smoothing it back with his palms. The kiss wasn’t gentle or careful. It was what was left after weeks and weeks of being careful and proper and too far apart. There was no space between them and Jem pushed her back until her back hit the door and there was no where else to go.

Tessa’s arms were around his neck and her mouth against his and he was holding onto her tightly enough that he was worried he might hurt her. All the practical things that they could be doing felt very far away. There would be time later. Jem knew that he could be looking at his last few days. There might not be much time later but he wasn’t going to waste the time he had on questions about lumber and broom closets when he could be spending that time with her.

“I’m cold,” Tessa said.

“What should we do about that?” he asked.

“Find someplace warm. Cuddle up close,” she said. “For warmth.”

She was looking at him as she said it. Her gray eyes were steady and she was smiling. A blush climbed up her face and he leaned in to kiss her cheeks. She was the one who kept getting nervous about what was proper but apparently that was limited to things that concerned Will. Jem had her pinned back against the wall and she was completely at ease with him.

He laughed and kissed her again. A flurry of little kisses along her cheeks and across her forehead. Quick and light and everywhere he could reach while she laughed. She braced her hands on his chest but didn’t push him away. A kiss on the bridge of her nose, one on each eyelid. One on her lips. And then another.

She was still laughing when she took his face in her hands so she could hold him still and kiss him back.

There were moments, moments when he let doubts creep in, moments when he let himself believe that she was kind enough to be engaged to a dying boy but couldn’t truly love him. Then there were moments like this when he was able to let that fear go completely. She kissed him without reservation. She kissed him for the same reason that he kissed her because sometimes all the words in the world couldn’t make a point as clearly as an action could.

“I love you so much,” he muttered into her mouth.  

She started to pull back to respond to the comment but he pressed into her and kissed her again before she could say anything. One of her hands had made it back to his chest and it tightened in his shirt front as her other wove through the hair at the back of his neck. She held him as closely as he held her. He forced himself to slow down, he needed to put this in words before he pulled her along any farther. Their bodies could communicate what they wanted but he needed to hear it from her.

“I love you,” he said again.

This time he stopped her face with his hand, holding her back rather than pulling her in. She frowned at him and pulled him a little closer. He didn’t kiss her again. He wanted to kiss her again. He almost gave up on talking altogether when she leaned up into his hand to reach him for another kiss. She wanted him closer and denying her, even for a moment, seemed like madness.

“Wait,” he said.

“What’s wrong?” she asked in that soft voice that killed him a little bit.

“I don’t want to stop,” he said.

“Stop?” she sounded genuinely confused.

Words failed him completely in that moment so he tucked his fingers into the waistband of the trousers she’d stolen out of the cabin owner’s closet and tugged her body tighter to his. His fingers rested against her stomach and his own nerves felt like they were going to crawl out of his skin. She was perfectly still and her eyes were trained on his as though he was the only thing in the world. Her eyes were almost blue and when she smiled, they crinkled just a little at the corners. He pressed a kiss to her mouth and then dropped his face down to bury it against her neck so he could have this conversation without her watching him.

She stroked his hair and didn’t ask him to explain it any further.

Her fingers traced down the back of his head to his neck and under his collar before following the same path back up. He stood stock still while she did it four times. Her fingers slipped through his hair, her palm spread against the back of his neck and then she slid back up again. She held him close.

He kissed her collarbone and then pulled himself up so he could kiss her forehead then her nose then her chin and finally her mouth. It was gentle and when he pulled back, his forehead rested against hers.

“I thought we would be able to wait until we were married,” he whispered.

“Do you love me?” she asked.

“Do you need to ask?”

“No, but I still like hearing it.”

“I love you, Tessa Gray.”

“When we get home, and we will get home, all of us, I want you to call me Tessa Carstairs. That’s our future.”

Jem smiled and didn’t argue. He just kissed her and said, “I love you Mrs. Carstairs, never doubt that that is the future I want.”

It wasn’t the future he was likely to get but that didn’t stop him from wanting it desperately.

He took a step back and she followed him. His nerves rattled. Not because he didn’t want it but because he did. Desperately. He wanted this. He didn’t know what he was doing and he was afraid of ruining it for her somehow. She smiled at him. She was blushing but her nerves couldn’t possibly be ringing in her ears the way that his were ringing in his. She was calm and confident and she spun around and sat on the edge of the bed like it was a parlour sofa.

He paused beside her. He must have hesitated too long because she reached out and took his hands. For a moment they stayed like that, hands joined and a little too much space between them but then she pulled him in closer and slid back on the bed, pulling him up to join her.

She pulled him down and kissed him harder than he had kissed her. He wanted to pull back and explain and ask permission but she didn’t need it. She knew what he was asking and she was saying yes. He gathered her up and wrapped his arms around her tightly before pressing her down into the mattress. She tightened her hold on him as well and when his hand found her hip and slipped up under the borrowed shirt, she arched into the touch. He pushed the shirt higher and she helped him pull it away from her.

“Tess,” he started.

She covered his mouth with her hand and spoke into his ear in a husky whisper, “If we’re doing this, you’re going to call me Mrs. Carstairs.”

He laughed into her hand and she laughed back, her forehead coming to rest against the juncture between his neck and shoulder. A thrill of confidence or hope or love or all of that and more rippled through him and pushed the nerves back a few steps. If she could be this calm, so could he.

“Take off the rest of your clothing then, Mrs. Carstairs,” he said with his mouth against her ear.

She giggled and did exactly as he had asked. She didn’t pull away from him. She was under him the entire time she undid buttons and shimmied out of layers of wool and cotton. She was naked before he was and if the cabin weren’t freezing, he might have pushed back the blankets just to look at her. He let himself imagine a wedding night during a London summer, where she’d be able to stand before him as naked as she was now and let him look over every detail of her.

Cold necessitated closeness and closeness necessitated that he use touch over sight. His hands traced down her shoulders and her arms then the slope of her ribs down to the narrow part of her waist before following her body as it flared to full hips and her thighs which had fallen open to allow him to lie between them. He ran his hands back up to catch any details he might have missed. Her stomach trembled under his touch and he paused to run first his fingers over that soft skin then to drag his palms over it.

She pressed back into every touch.

Any touch.

He accidentally bumped his shoulder into hers while trying to sit up and her body pressed back into that touch. Her back arched. Her hands found his and pushed his feathery touches down into her skin so he was holding onto her waist or, when he got brave enough, her breasts. She nuzzled his neck and held his wrist and forced his hand to stay against her breast until he began to stroke and knead and make her murmur happy little groans against his skin.

“Do you like that?” he asked.

“Yes,” she gasped out before giggling. She laughed and pressed close and grabbed hold of his wrist to make her desires unavoidable when her laugh became a murmur and she whispered, “Don’t stop.”

He was rolling her nipple between his thumb and forefinger and it made her entire body push up against him. Her head fell back and her back arched and he was left with too much skin to ignore. He kept his fingers tight around one nipple and took the other in his mouth. He had had his lips against her throat and her chest and this wasn’t so much different. She arched and he sucked until she groaned. He was running more on impulse and instinct than any intentional plan.

When he let her go, she was staring at him and she was flushed. Her cheeks and her neck were pink with a blush and he’d accidentally let the blankets fall far enough back that he could see how red and tight her nipples were under his fingers. He held her gaze and groped for the blankets, pulling them back around them both and tucking her in. Warm and safe. He needed her to be warm and safe.

She kissed him and when he pulled back from it he let out the admission, “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Me neither,” she said.

He laughed and let his head rest against the pillow beside her so they were cheek to cheek.

“This is wonderful,” she told him.

“This is perfect,” he agreed.

“I’ve never seen a man with his clothes off before.”

“No?”

“Never.”

He lifted his head to hold her gaze. She was confident and comfortable below him. Her eyes were bright and she smiled. Every fantasy he’d ever had had leaned more towards pliant and sweet and gentle offerings. She was nothing like that. Bright and demanding and grinning. All her worries and carefulness were washing away.

“You’re happy,” he said.

“You make me happy,” she told him and she grabbed hold of his collar to pull him in for a kiss. He lost himself to it for what could have been a moment or could have been an hour.

“If you want to see me naked, take my clothes off,” he said when his wits came back.

It was a flash of confidence he hadn’t been aware he had in him. He pulled away from her and lay down on his back. She was still grinning as she rolled over on top of him and started undoing buttons. She didn’t hesitate or ask questions. She started at his collar and worked her way slowly, button by painful button - it felt excruciatingly slow - to his waist before pushing his shirt apart and trailing her fingers from his stomach to his throat.

She sat up. The shock of cold air as the blankets fell back almost made him swear but he bit it back. She was smiling at him more softly now. Her fingers ran over his skin which was prickling with goosebumps. He grabbed her wrists and pulled her back down so her body was pressed to his.

“It’s too cold for that,” he said.

“Are you aware of how beautiful you are?” she asked.

His heart melted at those words but he kept both her wrists held in one hand and groped for blankets.

“Cold,” he said.

“I don’t care,” she told him.

He pulled her back into the blankets, rolling her over so she was the one her back as he pulled the covers back over them both. Even after a few seconds in the air of the room, her fingers her icy as she slipped them down his stomach to tuck them in under his waistband. He gasped and it wasn’t dignified. Her hand kept going. Clumsy but determined until it found his cock.

He inhaled and exhaled rather than releasing the stream of words. He wasn’t sure if he was going to swear profusely or call her the queen of heaven as her cold fingers traced down his hard cock from tip to base. She was tentative and slow and explored as though she wanted to get to know every contour. He pinned her down and breathed into her neck as her fingers kept working there way over every bit of him. She wrapped her hand around him and his hips jerked on instinct more than anything else and she froze.

“I don’t have any idea how this works, none,” she said.

“It goes inside you,” he said.

“That doesn’t make any sense, where would it fit?” she asked.

“I suspect that’s why losing your virginity is said to hurt,” he said.

“Where?” she asked.

He didn’t know, not exactly. The basic mechanics were easy to understand when it had been explained to him but the actual reality of having a person looking at him with a little line of confusion between her eyebrows and something dangerously close to fear in her eyes was not at all like theory.

“Tell me if it hurts, I don’t know much more than you do,” he told her.

Honesty was all he could handle in that moment. He would have preferred to have been someone who could give her something suave and confident and knowledgeable but he wasn’t and he couldn’t fake it. Careful, he could do. He could be careful and gentle and kind and hopefully that would be enough.

He ran a hand down her stomach and paused before more intimate places but her lips were against his ear and she was whispering, “Please,” as she pushed up against him. It was enough to make him confident. He was groping and probing and failing but her skin was hot and wet and she kept murmuring encouraging things in his ear. His fingers found her opening by trial and error and in a rush of enthusiasm and unreasonable self confidence they pushed into her. He hit her virginity and stopped. It was an actual barrier, he could feel it. Her skin was soft and very wet and he had two fingers slipped in just past her entrance and they had found this bit of something that stopped them.

“Oh,” she whispered into him.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“No.”

“It’s might yet.”

“I don’t care. You won’t hurt me.”

“Girls bleed, I’m going to hurt you.”  

“I trust you, a little bit of blood isn’t the same as you hurting me. I trust you,” Tessa’s eyes were open as she said this. Her hand came up to catch his chin and force him to look at her as she said it. His fingers were still pressed up against the unopened doorway to her body. She looked as calm and as confident as she ever had.

“You really do trust me,” he said.

“Yes, James, I trust you with my heart and my soul and every inch of my body,” she said.

He laughed and kissed her.

She slid down a little in the bed and took his cock in her hand and put it where his fingers were. He moved his hand to grab hold of the blankets because he didn’t know what to expect. He didn’t so much take her virginity as she took his. Her body was tight and hot and closed around him as she pulled him into her. He leaned into her once she’d started it and he could feel the moment that he was buried inside her. His hips jerked before his conscious mind caught up to the idea that it might hurt her.

“Oh,” was the only thing she said. Her fingers in his hair which had been gentle and had been carefully playing with the strands at the back of his head now tightened into a fist. Her hold was hard enough to jerk his head back and make him gasp. Her knees had been spread wide and they had snapped in tight as well so her legs were pressing in on either side of his hips.

He started to pull out. The tension in her muscles scared him.

“No,” she said. “I’m just fine. I’m very well. It’s only... I need a moment.”

Her hand in hair loosened and she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs curled around his back. He could feel her heels against the lowest part of his spine when she wrapped them together and used the muscles of her legs to pull his body into hers. She was murmuring things that weren’t words but she wasn’t shy about holding him where she wanted him.

“This doesn’t hurt?” he asked.

“It hurts but it’s not so bad, go slow, but please don’t stop,” she said in a rush.

He wanted to stop. The idea that he was hurting her scared him more than just about anything else but she pulled him in to kiss and he did what she said. He pulled back and sank back in. His body was ready to thrust into her hard and fast and to take his own pleasure but she had asked for slow so he forced his body to go slow. His mouth was on hers. He could feel her stomach tremble as it pressed into his. The hot and very wet entrance to her body squeezed around him unevenly and the collection of sensations was everything.

The building could have caught fire, a military brass band could have gone by, the sky could have fallen and he wouldn’t have noticed unless she noticed first. His attention was on her expression. He kept one hand cupped around her cheek and jaw so her face was turned to his. Her eyes were shut, her mouth was open, she was flushed and overwhelmed but not hurting. He would be able to tell if he hurt her.

She blinked her eyes open and found him staring at her and pulled him down to kiss.

He lost the rest of his grip on the world. Her mouth against his, her body against his, his cock inside her. He couldn’t form any kind of rational thought around the swirl of sensation. She was his.

It was an irrationally possessive thought. Tessa Gray was not something someone owned and he knew it better than anyone else but he couldn’t stop that feeling from blooming in his chest.

Mine.

He was losing the last shreds of control he had over his body and he wasn’t sure any more if he was being gentle enough with her. Her hips shifted under him and her head fell to his shoulder and she was holding onto him as release hit him. He let out a noise that was somewhere between a groan and a gasp and pressed himself as tightly into her as it was possible to be. He felt her stomach trembled and her hips twist and heard her groan in response but she didn’t ask him to stop.

He collapsed.

He grabbed hold of her and held on tight and her breathing in his ear, rapid but slowing was the thing he focused on to calm himself. Thinking was too hard for the moment. He just tightened his hold so his arms were cinched around her waist and back and his body was pressed into hers.

Close.

Close and warm and mine.

“Love you, so much,” he muttered into her neck because he was still too disoriented in the wake of the orgasm to say more than that.

She closed her arms around him. Her hand was in his hair, smoothing it back from his forehead and playing with it in sensitive little corners like the hollow behind his ear or the space over his temple or the nape of his neck. Even her thighs were folded up and holding onto him. He was surrounded by her and it helped keep the rest of the world away.

He said it in Chinese because he wasn’t sure he could find the words or the courage to say it when she might understand it. He whispered it against her neck, “I want to spend all my life, right here with you.”


	10. The Village

Will crested the hill and looked down at the little village. It wasn't as far away as he had feared that it would be. It was a cluster of little clapboard and wooden buildings all reduced to the same dull gray by the pounding of years of weather. He'd walked through driving wind and knee deep snow to get here. Snow never lasted long in London, the rain and the tromp of feet reduced it to slush before noon no matter how much snow fell in the night.

Here, the snow lay thicker than he'd ever seen it in Wales. The world had disappeared under a heavy white blanket. There was no evidence of other people around but the man Tessa had change into had memories of a small but bustling mining town. Perhaps no one had reason to be out this early or they were on the wrong side of the village to see the indents of roads and wagon tracks. He slogged through unbroken snow in the direction Tessa had indicated the afternoon before while they had eaten canned vegetables of unknown provenance.

As he walked, he scouted hunting locations, copses of trees where birds might be nesting or rabbits might be burrowing

If he took the time to be honest with himself he had no idea how to hunt effectively. His father had gone on fox hunts with the other local landowners but Will had never had any interest in going along with them and his mother had declared that he not go until he was older. He had left Wales before he reached an age or found the interest that would send him out into the woods with the hounds. He hoped that the skills he had learned as a demon hunter would be transferable. They were going to need something more than pickled root vegetables if they were going to survive very long out here.

He cut that thought off.  

Who was included in that "they" and who had a chance at surviving this little excursion if they were trapped in the snow was not a question that he was willing to address.

The relief of seeing the little town was short lived. There were no plumes of smoke rising from the chimneys of the little houses. There were no footprints outside the houses and the snow had banked against the walls in drifts large enough to obscure windows. Will rubbed his hands together and adjusted the too big coat and boots he had borrowed from the cabin's wardrobe and started down the hill towards the desolate little place.

"Hello!" he called as he stepped out onto what should have been the town's high street. His plans to remain hidden vanished. The place wasn't any less empty up close.

His nerves crawled.

Something was wrong.

Whatever language the signs were written in, Will could not read nor guess at the origin of. It could have been German but he had gone through enough German demonologies that he thought he should have been able to recognize the words of the language even if he couldn't translate it. It was easy to guess what the signs were meant to be. There would be a general store and feed store and probably a tavern, perhaps a business office for whichever company ran the mines.

There was an abandoned carriage with the harness for the horses still hanging in place though the animals were gone. It sat outside one of the grander buildings. Not that any of the buildings quite counted as grand but these ones appeared to have foundations instead of leaning against their neighbour and a drift of snow to keep upright. Will crept towards the carriage with the wariness he usually saved for demon nests and underground tunnels.

Every instinct thrummed with a fear that he couldn't explain but years of Shadowhunting had taught him not to ignore. He inched through the snow and up to the side of the carriage. It was half buried in a drift of snow and he stopped beside the door, standing at attention like a foot man. He'd inched the itchy wool mittens off and held a blade in his fist as he reached out with the other hand and grabbed the frigid metal of the handle.

A deep breath.

Cold sharp air.

On the exhale, he yanked the door open.

He waited, behind the door, knife in hands, ears attuned to any sound.

Silence.

He inched out from behind the open door and glanced inside the carriage, weapon still ready.

"Pardon me," he started before he realized what he was looking at.

Two men sat inside the carriage. It was upholstered in green velvet that had obviously seen better days, the curtains were faded and the plush of the velvet seats worn down so much that in places it was colourless. The men wore black overcoats buttoned up to their necks and warm hats pulled down over their ears. They sat across from each other, leaned back against the seats.

Dead.

It took Will longer to realize that that was what he was looking at then he wanted to admit. The cold had nearly preserved the bodies and they both sat with eyes open and staring. The colour of their skin, the cloudiness of their eyes, the stillness of them. They could not be alive and look like that. He leaned into the carriage, skin still crawling. People who died in violent situations was something that Will could handle. He had taught himself to handle it. Forced himself. Blood and gore had left him nauseous and shaking after the first few demon attacks he had seen but he'd learned to force down that reaction and pretend it didn't bother him. He pretended so often that the pretending had become second nature.

This was different. This wasn't the calm of a body laid out for burial or the violence of a life cut short by something with claws and teeth.

These men looked like they had just stopped.

They sat comfortably, not huddled as though they had frozen in some flash storm but as though they'd been engaged in conversation before their lives had simply ended. Except lives did not simply end. There were reasons even for the elderly who died in their beds. People did not simply stop living. Will forced down his revulsion and climbed up into the carriage.

"Lovely weather we're having, isn't it?" he said conversationally.

His voice was too loud. Far too loud in the quiet. He touched the bodies. Cold and hard as statues. Just statues. He just needed to check the statues for any evidence. There had to be a reason. People didn’t just stop being alive without a reason.

"I hear that the parliament has been voting on hedgehogs this week," he told them as he unbuttoned their coats. "I know what you're thinking, I thought it too, what an absurd thing for the government to be voting on. Every sane man knows that you don't speak against hedgehogs. Why it's barbaric to even be considering!"

The inane patter wasn't really helping but it was distracting him from his revulsion and his guilt. It was wrong to touch dead strangers, to go through their things. This wasn't acceptable but he needed to know what had happened to them. He needed to know if there was a threat to Jem or Tessa in this wasteland.

What if it had been a murder or an attack by some creature?

What if a disease had ravaged this town?

His skin crawled with that thought. Shadowhunters rarely got sick but how much safety did that grant him? Would it matter to Tessa?

He almost backpedaled out of the carriage at the thought but if he had caught it already, better to know definitively what he was dealing with and what he was bringing back to the others than let himself be motivated by vague fears. There was nothing of note on the bodies. They appeared to be in good health and had no injuries. There were small spots of blood on their collars and cuffs but no wounds to explain the stains so perhaps it was just that they shared a laundress and she was terrible at her job. No rashes. No injuries. No mucus or sweat on their clothing. No evidence of illness. That was a relief but it didn't answer the question of what had left two men in their forties dead in a carriage in their business suits.

And no one had found them.

Will climbed down out of the carriage, put his mittens back on and headed for the nearest building. He went building by building. In some he found corpses lying in bed or having fallen out of chairs. As untouched and undamaged as the men in the carriage. Other houses and businesses were completely empty. The possessions of people were still there. Unfamiliar currency with unfamiliar faces printed on it still sat sorted neatly in the till of the general store. The shelves were dusty but stocked. The larders in private homes were full of the frozen remains of rotted food and canned foods. Clothing still lay discarded on the floor or in hampers or hung in closets. Most of the miners seemed to have lived as bachelors without any housekeeping skills.

Then Will made it to the church.

Bodies were laid out in neat rows in the empty space where the pews had been pushed aside. The building was cold and the bodies were as well preserved as the men in the carriage had been. Will slowly walked up and down the rows and looked at the victims laid out as though they were sleeping.

Mostly men but the town would have been mostly men when they had been alive as well so that wasn't something that should have pulled Will's attention so strongly but it did. Men with beards and without. In their miner's jumpsuits or their pajamas or their heavy workman's clothes. Eyes open. Eyes shut.

All frozen solid.

Everyone who had lived in the town had died peaceful and without a mark on their bodies except for those few spots of blood on the edges of clothing. It had happened at a slow enough pace that their neighbours had been able to lay out the bodies.

All dead and he didn’t know why.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I started this just to write a bit of bed sharing. 10 000 words tops. But then this happened and then I just couldn't stop writing there.


	11. A Report and a Promise

Jem had gone back to sleep claiming both that he was fine and that the rest would be good for him. Tessa was trying not to worry and to distract herself however she could. She had already put biscuits in to bake. She did not have butter or eggs and she wasn’t sure that her baking powder was indeed baking powder so they wouldn’t be any better than the ones from the day before but they smelled good if nothing else. After that, she moved on to attempted repairs.

She was balanced on a precarious wooden chair trying to shore up the patch on the hole around the chimney pipe. She leaned back and frowned at the mess of pitch and wood and tried to decide if it was likely to catch fire or not. Nothing in her life had provided her with the experience she needed to answer that question.  She had repaired broken windows and learned to tell if a merchant was cheating her out of a fair price on vegetables but she hadn't the slightest idea how to fix a cottage in the middle of nowhere.

The door slammed open with a gust of cold air that scared her badly enough that she stumbled from the chair she had been standing on.

Will caught her before she hit the ground.

She yelped and looked up at him.

He had caught as she’d gone backwards and held her now with one arm around her back and the other under her knees. He grinned back down at her and put her back on her feet. She was a little unsteady for a moment. His eyebrows were snowy and his face was wrapped in a scarf but his eyes were immediately recognizable. A wave of relief washed through her. She had been as worried about him as she was about Jem and having him back where she could see him made her feel better.

He gave her a mock bow as she fussed with smoothing down her clothes. He went back to the door, dragged in a blanket bundle that rattled and clanged and tracked snow across the wooden floor. He kicked the door shut behind it but the temperature in the room had already dropped. Will left his mittens and scarf by the fire before he opened the bundle up and pulled out a few folded pieces of cloth. He talked animatedly through the entire process.

“That dress is going to be a bit short but it’s heavy wool and is going to be warmer than what you have and I found thick socks and boots that might fit you but I had to guess on the size of your feet. If they don’t fit, we’ll find you another pair,” he said digging through his pile of loot.

“You found the town?” Tessa asked him.

“That one there is for Jem, he’s going to hate that colour. I found a nice blue jumper that he would have loved but I thought making him wear that rusty colour would annoy him just enough to provide entertainment to the rest of us in the evening,” Will said.

“Will,” she said.

“Everything else is food. Preserves mostly. Pickled fish which looks disgusting but it’ll be a break from vinegary vegetables but I did find a sack of potatoes that had frozen before it rotted so hopefully it’ll thaw out and be edible.”

“Will, tell me what’s wrong.”

Tessa caught his hand and pulled him around to face her. She reached up and cupped his face in her hands. She regretted the familiarity of the touch immediately but his cheeks were so cold that she didn’t pull her hands away. The discomfort and wanting that came with touching him made it hard for her to assemble a coherent thought and she was silent for a long time as he stared at her. There was something in his expression that made her worry. Something that wasn’t very Will-like in spite of his jolly tone while he had spoken of the things he had brought back.

The silence stretched until he broke it.

“Everyone is dead,” he said.

“Everyone? Who?” she asked.

“Everyone in that town is dead. I don’t know why. I don’t know if anyone got out. I don’t know when it happened but there isn’t a living thing in that town now. I didn’t even see mice or any wild animals,” he said in a flat even voice, all the animation drained away.

“Oh,” she said.

She led him farther into the room and rummaged in his bundle of food until she found a tin of tea. Of course, he had found tea and dragged it back across the snow. The British treated tea like an elixir worthy of the effort. She didn’t say anything about it as she went back to the stove beneath the poorly patched hole and put on a pot of water to boil. Will surprised her by not breaking the silence.

He peeled off the winter layers and sat down beside Jem on the bed with his feet stuck out towards the fire in heavy woolen socks that he had written a rune on. A rune on poorly knitted yarn was as out of place as a priest in a brothel but maybe it was meant for warmth or something. She didn’t ask. She took in the details of him from the socks to the way he flexed his cold fingers to the damp curls at his temples as she waited for the water to heat.

She had brought in snow and let it melt into clear water. She wouldn’t have dared drink rainwater in London in case it carried some plague but the snow here was bright white and so clean the water looked like it had come from a spring. She made tea and brought three cups over to the bed. All without speaking. She sat down on a chair beside the bed and set the third cup on the little table beside Jem though he hadn’t woken through Will’s rambling.

Will kept reaching over to touch Jem’s hair or check his temperature. Jem slept through it. Tessa knew that his temperature was normal and he had been sleeping soundly since he’d come back in from hiking out to try and see what was in the little copses of trees nearby. He hadn’t found any winter berries but he had caught a small rabbit which was lying on the porch waiting for someone to figure out how to cook it for dinner.

“They had laid out the dead in the church,” Will said into the silence.

He held his tea cup between his hands and stared off into space. Will shaken was terrifying for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate. He was the boy who recited poetry while fighting demons and argued about literature while running for his life. Will was supposed to be the one to be fearless no matter the situation. She hadn’t realized that she was relying on him to come back with a plan until that moment.

“Others seemed to have died where they sat whether in a carriage or at their table. I found a man sitting in front of the frozen remains of a dinner. He’d eaten half of it and then just stopped,” Will said in that same even voice.

Tessa reached out but stopped short of touching him. He looked at her hand and then reached out and grabbed it. His palm was warm from the teacup but his fingers were still cold. He was quiet again as he held onto her. Their hands made a little bridge between them.

“I want to leave this place but as near as I can tell, the supplies and the workers were brought in by river barge not by road. We could walk along the edge of the river, just go south until we found the next town but it will be hard travel. I found some maps in the surveyor’s office but they don’t show much of the wider world. They just mark ore deposits, that kind of thing. We’re a long way from everything else wherever we are,” Will glanced at Jem and then back at her.

Not only would it be hard travel but it would take a long time. That was what that silent look said. It would take days to reach the next town and that next town would be another small village that survived on mining or farming and would not have what Jem would need.

He was going to die on the trip.

Tessa closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Will squeezed her fingers. Jem would have only a few days without the yin fen under the very best conditions. The harder he pushed himself, the shorter that time would be.

Rage sparked in Tessa but for once in her life she caught it before it exploded. She looked up into Will’s face and couldn’t throw the anger into that expression. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Jem who slept on: soundly and peacefully and normally. He was still doing well or at the very least he was hiding any struggles he was having incredibly well.

It wasn’t Will she was angry at.

It wasn’t Will’s fault that they were stranded with the only options being to sit and wait for Jem to die here, in as much comfort as they could give him or to wait for him to drop dead of exhaustion on the walk through the snow.

Tessa’s anger wanted someone to blame but there was no one at fault for this. It was chance and bad luck and bad weather. She couldn’t bring herself to blame Henry’s portal or Cecily’s enthusiasm or Will for bringing the bad news. She wanted to blame someone. She wanted to yell or throw things but she sat frozen by the enormity of it. Jem was fine. He was still perfectly fine.

“Stand up, come here,” Will said pulling on her hand.

She let him draw her forward and put their tea cups down on the table. He reached up with impossibly gentle fingers and brushed away tears she hadn’t even realized were running down her cheeks. He held her face and pulled her in close so that their foreheads touched. It was intimate and gentle and for a moment it confused her anger so much that she forgot it.

“Make me a promise,” he said.

“A promise?”

“It is far more than I should ask but please don’t let him see those tears. You are the one he’ll look to and you need to be the stronger one. Don’t let him worry about you,” he said.

“I will try,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said.

And then he released her and she sat back in her chair and turned all her attention to Jem’s breathing and pressed down the urge to cry or scream.

A moment later she held her hand back out to Will without looking at him.

He cradled it in both of his and they sat in silence and watched Jem sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *softly chanting*   
> angst angst angst


	12. Hopes and Fears

"It's July," Will said.

"There is half a foot of snow on the ground," Jem said.

They sat spaced out around the room. Tessa on the chair by the fire, Jem on the bed, and Will with his shoulders pressed into the door as though it needed held shut though the sun was still shining outside. He had crossed his arms and was putting all his energy into keeping his voice even. Jem sounded perfectly reasonable but Will didn't have his preternatural ability to stay calm. He glanced at Tessa but she was twisting her hands in her lap and staying silent. She wasn't even watching them though her attention would jump up sometimes as the conversation continued to travel in circles.

"Freak storms happen," Will said pointing out the window.

"There are no leaves on the trees out there, the ground was brown and dead when we got here, wherever we are, it is winter," Jem said.

"If we travel towards civilization-" Will started.

"-we could end up frozen to death when another blizzard comes through," Jem finished.

Will glanced at Tessa but she was still quiet. It was so strange for her to remain silent. She was usually full of questions and observations and arguments and ideas.

He knew why she was quiet but that just made him worry more.

He had never seen her use her ability so many times at once. They'd sorted through the items Will had brought back from the village and she had gone through them systematically. She had changed and changed back then changed again until her face was drawn and pale and Jem had coaxed her into stopping for a cup of tea and to share some canned fruit.

The people of the village had all died and Tessa kept coming up against memories of people finding their loved ones dead in their beds or sitting in a chair with a book still open on their laps. She had changed into someone who had been at two town hall meetings, held in the snow outside one of the company offices where people shouted and others used calm reasonable voices. The second of those meetings had been almost half the size of the first. She hadn't changed into anyone who spoke any English and though she had managed to find memories of cities in some of their thoughts, she had no maps.

Will had a paper map from the mining office, he hadn't spent much time there. There had been a dead body slumped over the counter and another lying on the floor in the records room and he hadn't been able to stomach any more death but he'd forced himself to find a map. It was labeled in that same language that the street signs had been and only showed parts of the coastline but there were two larger cities marked, one near the water and another further south.

That was where he wanted to go.

"It's a two day journey," he said.

"In good weather, assuming we aren't carrying too much," Jem said.

"There is not a cloud in the sky. This is a risk worth taking, this is the only possibility of success that we have and we have to leave soon," Will said.

Tessa closed her eyes.

"And if another blizzard blows in when we're a day's travel from shelter, walking across flat land without so much as a wagon or an extra day's worth of food, then what?" Jem asked.

"We take food, we take a tent, we build a fire. People have survived winters for hundreds of years. Snow isn't the end of the world."

"Did you find a tent?"

"No, but that doesn't mean there isn't one to be found."

"William," Jem said in a very soft voice.

"Doing nothing isn't an option. I'm not sitting in this godforsaken wasteland watching you die," Will said.

Jem ignored that.

"You need to be outfitted for a trip through snow," Jem said. "I'm sure it is possible to do with the supplies we might scavenger from the village but to do it properly, with any chance of survival, we need, at the very least, boots that fit and we don't have that. Two days is generous. Tessa hasn't much experience with hiking and to be quite frank, neither do you or I. By the end of the first day, my strength will be fading, the faster we try to travel the more true that will be."

Will caught Tessa shifting out of the corner of his eye. She was twisting her skirt in her fingers and her jaw was clenched but she only caught his eye for a second and she remained silent.

Jem kept speaking, "We need the rest of today to prepare for the journey. We could strike out tomorrow morning but I will be slowing you down by noon and likely no longer able to walk unassisted by sunset. The chances that both of you will survive a journey on foot across empty land in this weather are good. The chances that I will, are non-existent."

"I am not leaving you behind-" Will said.

"I will not allow myself to be the reason that you die of exposure," Jem said.

“I will not sit here and watch you die so that I can have an easier trip back to the city.”

“If it were a question of easy or possible, we would be having a different conversation.”

“If you’re so sure you’re going to die anyways, why not take the risk?”

“Because it isn’t just my life that is at risk.”

“Stop.”

Tessa’s voice was steady but softer than it usually was. Will turned his attention to her but she wasn’t looking at him. Her fingers twisted into a knot on her lap as she turned herself toward Jem. It took a moment for Jem to peel his attention away from Will and look at her. Jem sat drowning in a red wool jumper that was far too big for him and it made him look younger than he was. The vibrant colour didn’t help how pale his skin was but it suited the look in his eyes.

He was angry.

Will hadn’t really been looking at him while they’d been arguing. There hadn’t been any anger in his voice so it hadn’t occurred to Will that it would be there in his face but now that he was watching, he could see it in the line of his body and his shoulders.

It wasn’t fair.

It wasn’t fair was the kind of thing a child said and the kind of thing that Jem would never say. His entire life had been unfair and he had never said it, not once. Not when he was in the throes of a fever, not when he sat with the few keepsakes of his parents held in his hand, not when he spoke of all the things he would never have. Will had never seen those words in his expression before but it was there now. By no fault of his own, by no fault of anyone or anything but an accident of untested magic, Jem was going to die before he ever got to be married. He was going to die without a chance to say goodbye to Charlotte or Henry or a chance to hold his violin let alone play another song.

“We’re not solving anything with this argument,” Tessa said.

They weren’t but Will wasn’t sure there was anything to solve.

“We need yin fen and we need enough to keep Jem’s strength up,” she said. “If you exhaust yourself on the journey, it may not matter if we find the drug or not.”

It was the frankest Will had ever heard her be about yin fen. She usually tiptoed around the topic, using words like medicine and illness to cover up the harsher realities of the drug. There was a note of pleading in her voice as she spoke.

“If you aren’t taxing your strength, if you are resting and being careful, how long do you think you would-” she trailed off, leaving the unspoken words hanging in the air.

“It isn’t something I’ve tested,” Jem said.

“A few days,” Will said.

Jem shot him a look but this wasn’t a good time for coddling and lies. Jem might think there was something to be gained from protecting her from that truth but Will couldn’t imagine what it might be. He was willing to take the risks but he would not lie to himself about their chances. Their chances were slim but slim was not the same thing as nonexistent. There was a chance they might make it if the storms held off, if they found a sled in working order, if they left at dawn.

“None of this addresses the issue of what killed those people,” Jem said.

“We can send a Clave investigative team back once we reach civilization,” Will said.

“What if it’s an illness?” Tessa asked.

And that set off another round of questions and guess work that started to make Will’s head hurt. They didn’t know enough to have any answers. They weren’t even sure which country they were in which seemed like the most basic of questions to answer. Finally it was all more than he could deal with. He stopped in the middle of a sentence and pushed himself off the door so he could open it and step outside. He had thought the cabin was cold but stepping outside was like getting punched. He ignored the cold.

“Will?” Jem called after him.

“I’m hungry, didn’t you say you had caught a rabbit?” Will said.

Will found it sitting on the porch. They could figure everything else out after they’d had something to eat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I go back to work today. And while I am optimistic that I should be able to keep on top of my stress and keep updates rolling who knows, really. I can be a mess sometimes. 
> 
> So far, though, so good. Let's hope it all goes smoothly.


	13. Cooking Dinner

Will couldn't cook. Jem sat up on the bed and watched him try with a bemused smile on his face. He couldn't cook either but he wasn't the one who had volunteered to prepare the rabbit he had caught and help Tessa make a stew. Will was really trying very hard but his enthusiasm and smart comments couldn’t make up for the fact that he really, really didn’t know how to cook anything.

Will and Tessa were both fussing over him a little bit and it made something in Jem’s chest tight. He didn’t look too closely at the feeling and neither did anyone else but the undercurrent ran through the cabin like a building wave. It was strange to feel fine, to have a little bit of a craving and a little bit of an ache in his joints but nothing more. He felt fine and yet he knew.

He knew. Tessa knew. Will knew.

He felt fine but that didn’t mean that there was anything that could save him. They weren’t going to make it anywhere that could save him in time for it to matter. They could throw out ideas but each one was as unmanageable as the last. Will would have made the attempt but Jem refused to let him try. He wasn’t willing to risk both their lives on his failing health. These were the last good minutes that he would ever get. Each minute that ticked by was one of the last he would get.

There were worst ways to spend them.

"Don't do that," Tessa said snatching the pot back off the stove top and brandishing it at Will. "Don't heat it until there's food inside or everything is just going to burn. Here, here's a knife. Take the skin off the potatoes and cut them up. I'll do this."

She put the pot off to the side of the stove and shooed Will towards the table and the sad looking potatoes. Jem caught her eye and smiled. She smiled back with a bright broad grin that he didn't think was quite genuine. She was worried and she was trying hard to cover it up. Jem was happy to join in and play pretend that it was all fine.

"Can you handle cutting potatoes?" Jem asked.

"They're vicious little monsters, I might need assistance," Will said.

He held up a potato stuck on the end of the knife. It was shriveled and he'd cut out little eyes. He waved it at Jem like a poor man's puppet. An ugly, shriveled poor man’s puppet. The puppet turned slowly toward Will. He widened his eyes at it as though it had shocked him by moving on its own. Tessa turned to watch him. A smirk tugged at one corner of her lip as Will's expression shifted from surprise to horror.

Will leaned away from the supposedly possessed potato and then started to dodge away from it. He bounced around the kitchen as though he was running for his life. Tessa shoved him off when he got close and laughed at him. The potato puppet dodged toward her face and she shoved Will in the chest and ducked out of his way.

"Run, save yourself!" Will said.

"Get it away from me, we're never going to eat at this rate, stop it!" Tessa said.

She ducked away, laughing hard and pushing at his arm each time it got too close. It was better than most dinner theatre. Watching Will try to maintain his expression of horror and alarm while Tessa's musical laugh filled the space. She finally decided to try and ignore him. She stepped around him and kept cutting up vegetables and filling her soup pot.

Will's puppet settled in her shoulder and started asking questions.

"Missy what are you doing?" Will asked in a falsetto voice.

"I need the potatoes to go in once the meat is browned," she said.

"You would eat me? But aren't I beautiful? Poor me," the potato said.

Tessa plucked the potato off the end of the knife and picked up her own. Will gasped in shock as she started peeling the potato.

"You’re a monster!" Will said.

"I'm a hungry monster," Tessa said.

She handed him her knife and the partially peeled potato puppet. Will maintained the shocked expression as he slowly continued the peeling. Jem laughed and Tessa cut her gaze to him and they both looked over at Will as he held up the peeled potato and said in a forlorn voice, "Alas, poor Yorrik, I knew him well."

"Here he goes," Jem said.

Will kept cutting up potatoes but he didn't stop his recitation of the soliloquy. Tessa dropped in corrections and additions as she set the food to cook. Jem didn't really bother keeping track of the things that they were reciting. They had jumped to other characters and Tessa was doing responses and he had no idea what play it was. She laughed and the scent of cooking food started to fill the room. Jem hadn't realized that he was hungry until he could smell it.

Once it was all set to cook, Tessa came and curled up beside him. She wore a wool dress that Will had found for her when he was in the village. Jem held out a hand to her and she laced their fingers together. The little joints in his fingers ached at the contact and the little squeeze of her hand hurt enough that he had to cover the wince of pain by telling Will that his recitation was terrible.

“Really, you’re awful. I think demon hunting is a better profession for you than theatre,” Tessa said.

"How dare you!" Will said.

Will brandished the kitchen knife but there was a shift in his expression that wasn't about jokes or theatrics. Will had been covering his feelings with his little dramas but this little spark of attention was different from that.

Jem raised his eyebrows and Will shook his head imperceptibly. Tessa noticed the strength of their attention on one another but when she started to say something Will interrupted her with more nonsense.

"I have dreams of performance. I am going to act upon the Globe stage," Will said.

"The Globe burned down in the 1600s," Tessa pointed out, distracted for a moment from the way Will's eyes were tracking something behind her.

"Great woe has come over me at this news," Will said but he dropped the melodramatic voice by the time the sentence came to an end, he had shifted his footing and thrown the knife in one fluid movement.

The blade whistled.

Tessa flinched into Jem as it sailed over their heads and she turned a split second after it thunked against the wooden wall. Jem twisted too.

Against the wall, near the ceiling, the knife was embedded in the wood. Dangling from the blade was a thin blue creature, a little over a foot tall. It took Tessa a second to process the glamour that was on it but when she did her eyes widened and she started to climb off the bed to get a closer look.

Will met Jem's eye.

It was a silent question.

Jem nodded. He was still well enough to help with this. His joints were aching and he could feel the low fever that had begun but his breathing was still clear and the fever wasn't bad enough to slow him down much. Most importantly, he could still ignore the pain.

Will handed him a proper knife as he rounded the stove and headed for the window and the little body. Will caught Tessa’s sleeve and pulled her away with instructions to go get the rest of the weapons from his coat. It was an artful distraction, allowing her to feel useful while keeping her out of harm’s way. He caught Jem’s eye but neither of them mentioned it.

Jem swung around on the bed and dropped off the bed on the other side just behind Will. He scanned the floor and the walls but didn’t notice anything immediately and went to look at the little body.

It had short bright white hair that had been cut into a jagged mop that stuck up at odd angles. The elegant Fae from both the Seelie and Unseelie courts would have been horrified to see how little care it had taken with its appearance. Still, like most of them, it was nearly human. Every limb was too long and too blue but it was without wings or a tail or a stitch of clothing. The one unusual feature was broad clawed feet, more like a bird’s than a man’s.

Those feet would have left the footprints that Will had noticed outside the windows on their first morning in this place. It wasn’t a swarm of birds that had descended to peak in windows. It was a swarm of creatures like this.

“Faeries like to negotiate, don’t they?” Tessa said.

“Sure, if they think they can come out ahead in a negotiation,” Will said.

Jem caught movement out of the corner of his eye and whirled but it was gone into the rafters or invisibility before he could even be sure it was real.

“If you mean us no harm, we will mean you no harm,” Tessa said to the roof.

Will covered the distance to her and covered her mouth with a hand. He was gentle but Tessa obviously took offense. She stepped away from him, twisting under his arm and her face pulling into a scowl. Will matched it and Jem sighed. Loudly. Pointedly. There were other things to be dealing with. Will heard it and glanced across the space at him.

“Do not open negotiations until we know what we’re dealing with, please,” Will said to Tessa and then started towards Jem again.

“Why?” Tessa asked.

“Because Faeries like to find loopholes and they’re better at it than you are,” Will said hopping up onto the bed, which groaned under the sudden weight. The perch gave him a better vantage point to survey the rafters. The cabin didn’t have a high roof but from where he was standing, Will would be able to see along the top of the support beams and into the shadowed corners.

“Will,” Jem said.

“I don’t mean that to imply that Miss Gray is particularly stupid or particularly poorly prepared for negotiating with Faeries. They’d be better at it than I would as well. Generally, Shadowhunters who negotiate with Faeries train for years for the privilege. That wasn’t meant as a slight, merely a warning,” Will said.

His very genial response was delivered while he climbed up onto the cross beams of the ceiling. The cabin rose to a low peak and Will couldn’t stand on the cross beams but he could tap the beams and inch along to check the places where the roof joined the wall to see if there were holes or more Faeries hiding.

“Fine,” Tessa said but there was still a trace of annoyance in her voice.

Will swung out his legs and caught the next support beam over and pulled himself across the ceiling. It was clumsy and artless but it was fast and the space was small.

“Small fae don’t always obey the laws of nature,” Jem said.

“Apparently not,” Will said.

He dropped down out of the ceiling, blade still in hand and surveyed the ceiling again. He had landed in the kitchen and paused to stir the soup and taste a mouthful. The cabin was empty except for the three of them and the pitiful furniture. If there had been other Faeries with the one that he killed, they were gone.

“How did something so small kill an entire village?” Tessa asked.

“Because there are lots of them,” Jem said.

“That one was alone,” Tessa said.

“It was likely a scout,” Will said. “Hopefully it’s friend went home and told everyone else that we are far too dangerous to be trifled with and we won’t be bothered.”

Tessa had circled around to the body and was making the same observations that Jem had. She gingerly picked up one of it’s legs and looked at its foot. The broad spacing of the toes would allow it to walk across snow like a hare. It was well designed for living deep in the north.

“They are the ones leaving footprints in the snow,” Tessa said with dawning horror of how many there must be.  

“Why would they be killing people?” Jem asked.

“There can’t be much else to do out here,” Will said.

“Maybe the village was built on their land and they’re trying to scare off the humans?” Tessa suggested.

“Possibly but the speed and neatness of the deaths are thorough. That doesn’t seem like anger to me. It’s too organized,” Will said.

They talked back and forth and laid out everything they knew. Jem came and leaned against the counter near Will. Will silently suggested that he go back to bed and he just as silently refused. If there was still an attack coming, he wasn’t going to allow himself to relax. If a swarm came through the door or the cracks in the walls, he wanted to be prepared for that last stand.

When the people in the village had been killed, it had happened slowly and then faster and faster. There had been other people still healthy enough to bring the bodies of their neighbours to the church and lay them out neatly for their last rites. The outlying buildings had been emptied first. Single people died before couples and families because they would have been easier for a swarm to isolate and overwhelm.

“We’re safer together?” Tessa said.

“And we’re safer because we can see through their glamours. They could have filled the room if we were human and we wouldn’t have noticed,” Jem said.

“So much for a restful night’s sleep in the frozen wasteland. I guess we need to sleep in shifts. Who wants soup? Is the soup done?” Will asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love this goddamn chapter so much.
> 
> It's not a tone I usually write in but I enjoy it a lot. 
> 
> Why does Jem think that anyone else would sit by and allow him to sacrifice himself to the greater good? Has he met either of these two?


	14. Journey by Night

Tessa was grateful that Will had stayed up to keep watch while she and Jem had climbed into bed. It was blissfully distracting to be pulled back in against Jem's chest and have him bury his face in her hair. Her mind was full of thoughts of that morning and it helped push out every thought of that evening. She let herself think about him and about the things they had done together and not think about the blood smear on the floor or the body of the faerie they had put out on the porch because they had nothing else to do with it. She pushed out thoughts of ticking clocks and Will's worried expression and Jem's carefully chosen words that didn't quite cover his fear.

She had tried and failed to turn into the faerie itself. She had laid her hand against its cold skin and felt the spark that would have allowed her to make the shift but the control and the power it would have taken to force her body into such a tiny shape had left her shaking before she even truly attempted it. She wanted to know but her hands shook and Will had taken the body outside. Neither of them tried to convince her to do it but it still felt like a failure to not be able to make that shift when she might have been able to learn something important. 

She laced her fingers with Jem's and shut her eyes against the memories and the worries and the fears and everything else clamouring for her attention and let the feel of him near her be everything. His nose was cold, his hands were warm, he smelled like bitter sugar. If she laid very still and matched her breathing to his, it almost felt like she was calm. Almost. 

Around midnight, or what she imagined was midnight, Tessa dragged herself out of bed. It was dark in the cabin, there wasn't much moonlight to see by and she was left groping around to find the foot board of the bed and make her way over to Will's silhouette at the window. He wasn’t much more than a darker shadow against the meager light outdoors.

"Go back to sleep, Tess," he said.

"You need to rest," she told him.

"I'm not tired," he said.

"But you will be and if something happens, you're," she trailed off and then tried again, "If you are too tired to help, won't be a good thing."

It was true. She didn't like the idea of Jem throwing himself into a battle and draining his strength and she barely had the aim to hit a target with a properly weighted throwing knife. Will had hit the faerie with an old kitchen knife. He was their best chance if it turned out the faeries were dangerous.

"I was wrong to kill it," Will said.

"If they're responsible for killing all those people-" she started.

"If they're not? Some of the lesser fae aren't really like humans. I don't just mean that they're strange, I mean that they aren't all people. Some of them are more like animals. There are goblins who have civilizations and families and are people and then there are types of pixies who don't do much more than eat berries and bite travelers. We know nothing about these ones," Will said.

"Then we'll learn more," Tessa said, "Now go off to bed, there's no good to come of staying up and worrying over it."

"Are you my mother, now?" Will asked.

"Don't be a pain. You know I'm right," she said.

She had been braced for him to argue with her but he didn't. He laughed softly and she heard his feet hit the floor gently as he slid down off his window sill perch and headed for bed. She tried very hard not to think about the soft rustling sounds that had to be him changing into his night clothes and climbing up into bed with Jem. It was intimate to be alone in the dark, even with the entire room between them, even when he wasn't so much as looking at her.

She chose a woolen sweater by touch before pulling herself up onto his spot by the window and looking out at the blue shadows on the snow. If there were faeries out there, she couldn't see them. She listened to Will's breathing change. He had been lying about being tired and soon his breathing had fallen into a slow rhythm that matched Jem's. Tessa smiled in their direction and let her imagination run away with her for a moment. She could imagine them as little boys, leaning on each other after having both lost so much.

They would be safe together. They would look after each other.

She had put away Will's collection of food from the village and she had done it carefully. She had set aside enough for herself and then put everything else away in the leaning cabinet in the corner. She went to her collection, already wrapped and tucked back into the sheet Will had used to drag it all down the hill. Neither of them had worried about what she was doing and so she hadn't bothered to try and hide it. Now she had a little pack, intentionally small because this plan would only work if she could travel very fast.

She transformed into Camille.

Her heart stopped beating and her skin stopped caring how cold the window beside her was. She didn’t react to it but somewhere in the back of her mind some instinctual corner cried that she was standing in a dead body and that it was wrong, so wrong, so very wrong. She cut the thought off. She had enough experience as Camille to do this. She would get used to the vampire’s body again.

She tucked the smallest pair of boots into her pack and pulled on her own slippers then dressed in as many layers as she thought she could without limiting her movement. She was a vampire. She wouldn't care about the cold but if she hadn't found shelter by dawn, she would have to travel in a human body so she was going to need to be able to keep it warm.

She was ready to go but she hesitated at the door. Camille could see in the dark far better than she could and making her way back to the bed was easier than finding her way out of it had been. She smiled and pushed Will's hair back off his forehead but didn't touch skin, her fingers would be cold and she wasn't willing to risk waking him. It was good reasoning but it fled when she looked down at Jem. She pressed a kiss to his forehead and he responded by shifting in closer to Will.

On the back of a torn label, she wrote a quick note, explaining where she'd gone and why she would be too far ahead of them for it to be reasonable for them to come after her. She put that on the table beside the bed.

There wasn't time for more hesitation. She needed every hour of night possible if she was going to travel fast enough to make this trip worth it. Outside, the world was silent and icy and Camille's nose could pick up nuances in the wind that Tessa couldn't even begin to make sense of.

She kept her back to the town, checked the landmarks around her and then leapt off the porch to land neatly on top of the snow and take off at a run.

 

The snow didn’t start in earnest until she had made it past the point where they had arrived. The storm blew up without any warning. Snow started falling slowly at first then thicker. Her vampire vision had made it easy to see in the dark but seeing through the white out was far more difficult.

The first gust of wind nearly knocked her off her feet. She pinwheeled her arms and then stopped trying to use her own instincts and let herself fall back on Camille’s vampiric ones instead. Camille found her balance, running into the wind and then cutting back the way she wanted to go. The storm was going to slow her down but it was an inconvenience, nothing more.

At least she thought it was.

The storm started to clear as she turned to cut forward again and she found herself bearing down on trees. She slowed to a jog and looked around. There should have been another two hours journey before she hit the forest that lay between her and the coast. She had been slower not faster. She turned in a circle and caught the scent of wood smoke on the air.

Maybe it was just another copse of trees like the one near the cabin. The wind was dying down from a furious howl to a drone and the tree branches shook and snapped into one another. She looked up but the sky was too cloudy for her to use the moon to reorient. She needed to get back into the open so she could see the hills.

She ran parallel to the little copse of trees, keeping it on her right and kept glance back the way she had come to catch a glimpse of those other trees and those dark hills through the snow.

Nothing.

Even as the snow tapered off, the view was flat. Tessa stopped and spun slowly, letting her nose catch that scent of wood smoke again and using that to orient herself. When she opened her eyes, she was facing the hills. They were behind the trees, in the same direction that the smell of smoke was coming from.

It wasn’t the smell of a cabin or a hunter’s camp. It was smoke from the cabin. Their cabin. The one she had just left. The trees in front of her were not some new copse of trees, they were the same ones that stood outside the cabin. She was just on the far side of them. The storm had turned her around so completely that she had circled back to face the direction she had come from.

She swore.

Camille’s mind supplied a variety of French words for her to use and she muttered them as she skirted back around the trees to try again. She had lost more than an hour running in circles in the snow but it wasn’t so much that she couldn’t still make the journey in the time she had left. Now that the storm had blown itself out, it would be a smooth trip.

She started out again. She used the same landmarks and once she’d passed the line beyond the edge of the trees, the wind started again.

Tessa stopped. She looked out at the night. She could still smell the wood smoke through the wind. It was difficult to pick out where exactly the smell was coming from but if she stopped and focused, she could do it. There wouldn’t be any landmarks once she had crossed into the snow and the direction of the wind wasn’t reliable but Camille’s sense of smell was.

She reoriented herself and started to run again.

The wall of the storm hit her with the same ferocity but none of the surprise and when she felt the wind start to push her, she paused and planted her feet. Once she caught the smell of smoke, she turned and started again. It was not nearly as fast as she wanted to be and she was starting to get desperate for a break in the snow if only to be able to see more than her snow encrusted hands. Even vampires got tired eventually and she could feel the prickle of hunger each time she pushed herself back up to a run.

When she caught the scent of something living on the wind she wavered and had to stop. The hunger hit her like a punch.

The sound of his voice came next.

Distant and wind torn and she knew that her human ears wouldn’t be able to pick it out but it was there.

The smell of smoke was stronger now.

The voice again, it was still impossible to determine what he was saying but it was a voice she knew.

Wood smoke.

Will.

She knew before the snow broke what she was going to see in front of her.

She was at a different angle this time, staring at the cabin from the back as the wind broke and the snow eased. Tessa dropped to her knees in the snow. The change wavered but she grabbed hold of it and held it tight because she was still too far out to slog through the fresh snow and make it to the cabin in her own body. She needed Camille’s ability to get back up and travel across the snow.

“Tessa!” his voice carried over the snow.

“I’m here,” she said. She didn’t yell it back. She just said it and forced herself to stand and start walking towards him.

He saw her coming and started towards her but the snow was approaching waist deep and it was all freshly churned by the wind. He stood near the cabin and watched her come. There was a light on inside, that poor wretched little candle was burning on the bed side.

“What the hell were you thinking?” he asked when she was close enough that he didn’t have to yell. The snow was still falling and his cheeks were red from the cold. She wasn’t sure she had ever seen him look so angry.

“That I could make it,” she said.

“You-” he started.

“It’s almost dawn,” she interrupted. “Even without the storm, it wouldn’t be possible to make that city to the south before the sun rose. I needed to make it that far as Camille because I will die of exposure traveling in my own body.”

Her voice sounded hollow and strange to her own ears. She had been so sure of this. She had put so much hope into it. There was no hope of anything else being effective. Making the city with Camille’s speed was possible if she had had most of the night to do it. It was a two day journey there and back on human feet. That was four or five days there and back that Jem didn’t have but a vampire was far faster. She could have cut the travel down to one there, one back.

And now that possibility was swept away but snow and wind.

“Come back inside,” Will said

His own anger disappeared in the face of whatever expression she was making. She didn’t know. The emotion felt too big for her body. It all felt like it was too much and when she opened her mouth to try and put it into words, all that came out was nonsense.

“I’m covered in snow,” she said as though it mattered.

“That’s what you’re worried about?”

“I’ll melt on the floor and make a mess.”

“I’ll get a goddamn broom and brush you off, then, but come inside,” Will said.

He held out a hand to her and she took it and let him drag her forward as the snow slowed to a flurry and the edge of the sky lightened. Dawn was coming and it was just further proof that there was no hope left in this plan.

Will helped her pull off the outer layers so when she stepped into the cabin, she wasn’t dumping snow on the floor. She waited until she was inside to change back into herself. Snow was clumped in her hair and she was immediately cold when she fell back into her own body, the vampire hadn’t had any body heat to warm the clothing. She stood still and tried to reorganize her thoughts. Will shook snow out of her things and kept his silence. There was no judgment from him. No admonishments now that she was back inside. 

Jem was there and he didn’t say a word, he just reached out and wrapped his arms around her and pulled her into his chest, bulky coat and snow crusted hair and all. She didn’t sob and it didn’t help her make any sense of that too big emotion that was a mix of grief and frustration and helplessness and anger. Still she curled into the hug and just held onto him.


	15. A Hill to Die On

The morning’s snow had covered up any evidence of whether or not the Faeries had visited in the night. Outside the windows, the snow was smooth and pristine and drifting high enough that on the north face of the house, the windows were partly covered. If they had opened them, the snow would have poured in onto the floor. On the other side of the building, the wind had swept spaces so clear that there wasn’t enough snow to leave footprints.

Tessa sat in the body of the cabin’s owner and his heavy winter coat. She perched on one of the chairs in the little kitchen with all the poise of an English lady at tea. The body she wore was probably past 50 and heavy set with a broad pleasant face. His eyes crinkled at the corners as though he’d spent his life smiling. He looked plain and honest like every farmer in every poem that had ever been written about idyllic country lives.

“We will starve eventually,” Tessa said.

Her inflection and accent sounded incredibly out of place coming from the man’s big body. She had woken Will from a nap with a booming string of some foreign language before explaining what she wanted to do. Will had grumbled at her but she’d been pleased that she was starting to get used to the change enough to find the man’s voice. She was planning on using the man’s knowledge of the area and of trapping to go find more food.

“You could just stay inside for once in your life,” Will said.

“That’s not going to help anything,” she said.

“You’re still exhausted from last night. How long did you sleep? Two hours?”

“I need to do something useful or I will lose my mind,” she said and that at least, he understood. Will pressed his lips together and tried to come up with a better argument than her own wellbeing. She did not care nearly enough about her own wellbeing. Neither did Jem. How Will had found himself so tied up with two people who were so unconcerned by their own health and safety was a mystery to him. Keeping them safe was more than anyone could manage.

She sat on one of the spindly wooden chairs, pulled up on Will’s side of the bed as she argued with him. Jem slept on without so much as twitching. That was a bad sign and Will hated to admit that, even to himself. When Jem was sick he either slept extremely poorly or like the dead. Will hated himself a little bit more as soon as that phrase had crossed his mind.

“So, we go raid more houses in the village. There were a hundred people there. There’s enough food to support the three of us,” Will said and the irritability crept into his voice.

“It would help if we found fresh berries and meat as well. I think if you eat nothing but pickled fish and unleavened dough, your blood turns to vinegar and paste,” Tessa said.

“You’re going to go out into the cold to risk your life because you’re sick of the food?” Will asked.

“I am not risking my life!” she said, “I will be armed and Olaf knows the land better than you or I do.”

“Explain it to me, I’ll go out into the snow. I’m a Nephilim, I can use runes and I am stronger than your little dress up body there,” Will said.

Tessa let out another string of the foreign language, “Did you get that?” Either she couldn’t or wouldn’t translate the man’s knowledge. Will couldn’t tell if she was doing it on purpose or if she truly couldn’t understand the man’s thoughts well enough to explain it in English. She was right and he was losing this argument and as much as he wanted to go out there with her, leaving Jem alone made him even more uneasy.

It was midmorning. Bright and clear and as safe as a place like this could ever be.

“Tessa,” Will started.

It was an impossible choice. To leave one or the other of them in danger was unconscionable to him but if Tessa was bent on this decision, then that was the choice he was going to have to make.

“I need to go for a walk and clear my head,” she said in a softer voice. Even with Olaf’s baritone voice, Will could only hear her. “This way, I can do something useful while I do it. You can’t reason with me on this one, William, I need to go outside and this is the best way to make it worth something.”

“I want you to take both the runed blades and not go out of sight of the house. If a storm comes in, you don’t want to be stranded out there,” Will said.

In answer, she gave him a string of musical syllables.

“What?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Tessa said with a little laugh that sounded even stranger coming from this body. A girl’s giggle was out of place on this man’s face. She glanced at the bed and said, “Look after him. He’s been tossing and turning. I warmed up the rest of the rabbit stew before I changed. It’s on the stove. Try and get him to eat, he needs the strength-”

Will had to interrupt her to say, “I know and I will, I swear. Go catch us something good for dinner, I’ll be a good housewife and make biscuits even worse than yours.”

Tessa’s laugh escaped from the man’s body again but fizzled quickly. She shot a final sad look at Jem before turning for the door. She had to shoulder it open, leaning all the miner’s weight into the snow that had drifted onto the porch and against the door. Will started to object and she stopped in the door to show him that she already had his daggers in her pockets then ducked out into the bright morning air.

Will lay back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. He counted Jem’s breaths as he waited for the worry over Tessa to ebb. Jem was breathing unevenly. One breath shallow, the next deep and shaky before a string of shallow ones that Will could barely hear.

It wasn’t a relaxing sound to listen to.

“Tess left the last of the soup on, you want some?” Will asked nudging him hard enough to jar him.

“Hmm?” Jem said.

“Wake up,” Will said.

“Why?”

Will switched to Welsh and said in a rush he knew Jem wouldn’t understand, “Because I cannot stomach being in this place alone listening to you die.”

Jem groaned, “Of all the languages-”

“Get up, have some soup,” Will interrupted.

“No.”

“Alright then, I will bring you some soup.”

“If you must.”

Jem struggled up to sit up against the headboard and ran his fingers through his hair a few times to try and smooth it down. It didn’t work. He looked annoyed and he cast around the room for Tessa. The annoyance shifted to concern. Before he could ask, Will filled him in on Tessa’s hunting expedition and just kept talking as Jem’s expression grew accusatory.

“You should go out there after her,” Jem said.

“It’s a clear day and she’s right. The trapper who survived out here on purpose will have better luck laying snares than you or I will,” Will said.

“The trapper is also dead.”

“Tessa is armed, not a mundane, and besides it is the middle of the afternoon and there are approximately twelve trees. Are you really worried that about her?”

“A little. Aren’t I allowed to worry about her?”

“You just don’t like that she’s not here.”

Jem shrugged and accepted the cup of soup from Will and took a sip. Will hadn’t asked and Jem hadn’t mentioned it. If his breathing was uneven that usually meant his joints were bothering him too. A cup was easier to manage without help than a bowl and spoon. Will had served himself in a cup too and climbed up over Jem to sit beside him on the bed.

They ate in silence. Will stared at the rough-hewn walls and the glow of the sunlight through the fabric plastered over the window. It was pink and red and it cast the room in a rosy light. The window in the kitchen was uncovered and it looked out on bright white snow and a crystal clear blue sky.

Jem leaned over and slumped against Will. He was radiating heat and for a panicked moment Will thought that he had passed out but Jem shifted to a more comfortable position and took another sip of soup out of his cup. His cheek rested on Will’s arm and his leg was lined up against Will’s under the blankets.

He was not ready for this.

“There are other people I would have liked to have said proper goodbyes to,” Jem said.

No.

No, Will wasn’t ready for this at all. But he didn’t stop Jem as he continued to talk.

“I had thought I would have had the time to see it coming. I don’t feel sick yet. I don’t feel well but I’d just need a little and I would be back to my usual self. I hadn’t thought it would happen like this on a slow but impossible to halt slide into the illness. I hate how much I want it. Even now. Even like this, I hate that I want the damn drug so much,” Jem said.

Will shut his eyes against the cabin and pressed back into Jem, slouching down a little more so they were closer together and Jem’s head could rest in the crook of his shoulder instead of against his arm. Jem settled with him and they curled together as they had since they were children. Back then, there had been no one else to comfort them but they had each other and that had always been enough.                                           

“With my parents dead and no hope of joining the fight against the thing that had killed them, I had thought I wouldn’t find meaning or purpose in London. I remember how much I hated the idea of being sent off to die quietly where I wouldn’t bother anyone important with my suffering,” Jem said.

“You hid that bitterness well,” Will said.

“It was not bitterness, more like disappointment, and I found that whether the Consul had intended to remove the dying boy to an uninteresting corner of Europe or not, what I found in London wasn’t a meaningless hospice but new life. It be short and haunted by the drug but it would be a true life.”  

Will nodded because he couldn’t find the words he needed to respond to that.

“I found you and you became a purpose worth having,” Jem said.

Will snorted but Jem cut off any argument.

“You had the potential to be both the warrior I had dreamed of being and the kind of good and honourable man that my parents had tried to teach me to be. And you needed so much work on the first part and you buried the second so deeply it was almost invisible. Charlotte and Henry, they worried and cared but you wouldn’t give them an inch. No one was going to fight for the person you could become.”

“And so, you decided to take on that impossible journey all on your own? That’s not a purpose, that’s a hill to die on,” Will said.

“I needed a hill to die on,” Jem said with a shrug and Will flinched and his own idiocy for choosing that turn of phrase at all. Jem didn’t mention it, instead he laughed softly and said, “And in the end, it’s a battle that’s been won though I don’t know if it was my victory or your own. I don’t really care either way.”

A silence stretched out in the space between them.

It sounded like an invitation that Will had been waiting for but was suddenly afraid to take. He had needed to say these things to Jem for weeks but he hadn’t been able to find the words that would soften his own selfishness. He wanted to paint himself as something other than the selfish child he had been and continued to be. The truth mattered more than his pride.

“It was your victory,” Will said as the silence was starting to reach its breaking point.

“Hmm,” Jem said.

Will started the story at the beginning. The story of his mother and father that he suspected Jem knew though Will had never been the one to tell it. The story of the Shadowhunters who came to invite him to join the Clave when he was young. He finally told the story of the pyxis and Ella and the curse.

“I needed a friend more than I cared if it killed you,” Will said in a whisper as he reached the part of the story that Jem knew. The part where Will had taken his hand and agreed to train with him. Will had offered his friendship knowing that it was risk.

Jem reached out and took his hand. “And I needed a friend worth dying for.”

“I was expecting you to be angry about it. I could have killed you,” Will said.

“You just told me the curse was false, I was never in danger from you.”

“But I believed it was true. I believed that danger was real and risked your life on it.”

“If you asked, William, I would have risked my life on it myself. I always knew you had a secret. How stupid would I have to be to not know that? Standing by you was always a risk.”

Will started to argue again and Jem just shook his head and squeezed Will’s hand with his. His skin was clammy and warm. Will suddenly couldn’t breathe around the possibility of losing him, of watching him die and not being able to do anything to stop it. What was left of Jem’s life could be counted in days, maybe hours. They were into lasts. The last breakfast they shared. Soon the last time, Jem could sit up on his own.

Last. Last. Last.

“If I headed south,” he started.

“No.”

“But-”

“No. Because there is something I need to ask of you and you can’t do it if you leave on some impossible journey that will lead you to nothing but more snow. The best possible scenario in going out there in the snow is that you find a mundane village and that will not help me. I am beyond help and that is not the fault of you nor anyone else,” Jem said.

“You’re going to make me promise to look after Tess,” Will said.

“Of course, I am. I’m going to make her promise the same of you. Don’t leave her alone. I would really appreciate it if you would go out in the snow and make sure she is alright,” Jem said.

“Fine,” Will said.

“Thank you, go now,” Jem pushed him in the shoulder and will laughed, rolling over and reluctantly getting out of the bed.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> angsty angsty AAAAANGST
> 
> Tessa. Chill. Honey. Please.   
> (Tessa has no chill. Tessa's also having a pretty serious meltdown and is pretending that the others haven't noticed.)


	16. The Woods

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are reading this update by update, I edited chapter 13 to include a minor scene where Tessa tries and fails to turn into the faerie that Will had killed. She references that scene in this chapter and I realized too late that I never actually WROTE that scene. Anyways. Just for the record, that happened. It makes what she does here make a little more sense. 
> 
> If you're reading this thing in a binge sometime after it finished. hiiiiiiii.

After convincing Will to stay and watch over Jem, she knelt on the porch. Tessa had brought with her one of the last pieces of the shredded curtains and she unfolded it now. This body's knees creaked at the effort but she ignored the stiffness. The little blue body of the dead Fae was still lying on the porch where Will had put it. It was frozen and something instinctive in her recoiled at the knowledge that it had been alive only the day before. She lifted it onto the curtain and wrapped it up with a makeshift shroud.

She took the little bundle with her as she headed out toward the trees.

Olaf's knees protested but he knew how to move in snow and she let his instincts carry her around the heavier drifts. The boots and coat were warm enough that the bite of the winter wind only found her face and the tips of her fingers despite the scarf and mittens. It was bright and white and empty like the world had been reduced to an artist’s canvas and they'd forgotten to paint anything but sky. Even the trees were the black and gray of a pencil sketch.

She kept an eye on that sky but there were no clouds, the horizon was a straight line without the haze of an incoming snow storm. The night before had taught her not to trust the weather and she checked it repeatedly as she walked. Her attention strayed back to the horizon and all the space that lay between home and this place.

She had brought Olaf's collection of snare traps even though she didn't understand what the loops of rope and leather were meant to do. She had looped them over her shoulder, trusting the change’s muscle memory to loop them properly. With any luck, she would be able to rely on the body’s practiced fingers to lay the snares but figuring all that out could wait. There was something she needed to do first.

The idea that the Faerie needed to be brought back to the forest had struck her when she had touched the body the night before. She had reached out to see if she could make the change and while she'd been able to find the spark she needed, the idea of molding her own body into such a tiny shape had unnerved her too much to try. Without truly making the change, she hadn't been able to learn anything but the desire to go home had lingered.

It was a little thing but it was a little thing that she could do.

She found a spot in the middle of the trees, just out of sight of the cabin. She laid out the bundle in the snow and adjusted the edges of the gingham so the fabric laid smooth over the body. The faeries were dangerous or at the very least, they were connected to something dangerous in this place. Whether they were responsible for the storm or not was impossible to say. There was nothing else to be learned from the body itself and she didn’t want it on their porch. Honouring the faerie’s final wish to be brought back to it’s people wasn’t going to hurt any one.

Once the body was laid out, she moved away to sort the pieces of the snares and check their condition. She found a clear spot in the snow not too away from the body. She had to sink back into Olaf's mind to do it but once she let his memories take over, the pieces took shape and she found herself considering nearby locations to set them without really understanding what she was looking at.

She didn't hear them.

The first one climbed down a tree to her left. Its long limbs braced wide and thin fingers digging into the bark to keep it steady as it moved headfirst like a squirrel. It was followed by others, climbing the same way.

She registered the movement as the first one landed in the snow. She kept still and continued running snare strands through her fingers as though she couldn't see them. Mundanes wouldn’t be able to see them. She wasn’t using Olaf’s skills any more. She was just fiddling it the leather in her hands. Her concentration was good enough to pretend that they weren’t there but not so good she could continue working through it.

They gathered in a mass around the body of their fallen comrade. There were enough of them, all pressed together that it was hard for her to pick out individuals. The pale blue of their skin wasn't so far from the colour of the snow and single ones, like the one who stood sentry nearer to her, were hard to pick out amid the shadows cast by the trees.

Panic was building in her chest.

It was an old instinctive panic that her new life among Shadowhunters and Downworlders should have been helping her to get over. Something in her chest was reminding her over and over again that these creatures weren't a part of the nature she knew. The panic had faded with each shock. The Silent Brothers were no longer so terrifying as they had been at first. A warlock with a mark no longer seemed so strange. Nature was bigger than she had ever imagined but knowing that and truly believing that were not the same thing.

Now that fear of the unknown was back again. Instinct whispered in thoughts and made her heart beat faster.

Danger.

That little voice whispered that this was strange and therefore dangerous. There were rational fears too. She knew that they were likely responsible for the deaths of those people in town. She knew that they were fast and had some magic. Both the mundane girl she had been once and the person she was now had reason to fear these creatures. That didn’t mean she was going to let them see the fear.

The swarming mass drew in around the corpse and then started moving off down through the trees leaving the bird like footprints they had seen on the first day. The body was gone in their wake, they must have been carrying it but Tessa couldn’t make out the details in the crowd. The panic ebbed. They had come to claim a fallen comrade, nothing more.

She glanced up at the sentry that was watching her and found steady ice white eyes looking back at her. The narrow-pointed features were just far enough from human to make it difficult to identify the expression. She looked back. It was an accident but it was impossible to cover now. Her heart rate picked up and she couldn’t tell if the fear was her own or Olaf’s. It didn’t really matter.

She lifted a hand in greeting while the other disappeared into her pocket to curl around the hilt of Will’s knife.

It spoke. She stared and waited for it to repeat it. She tried to force her mind to wander. The sounds weren’t in a language she knew but they might be in a language that Olaf did. She had to get her own rushing thoughts out of the way and let the deeper memories and instincts carry her through.

“Human eyes cannot see us,” it said again, “What are you?”

“I’m human,” she said.

The sound of the English words was wrong. She spoke in a voice that wasn’t her own and it was too loud in this quiet place. It was the wrong language. It was a lie. She wasn’t human and she knew it. She was not quite sure what she was exactly but it wasn’t human at least not like this creature meant human.

“I’m not human,” she said again but still in English.

She could let her mind wander enough to understand the things the Faerie said but not enough to respond to him. They stared at each other across the space.

Then Tessa changed, she kept her hand on her knife and she changed back into her own body. Her feet were too small for the boots she was wearing but she could see the expression on the Faerie’s face as she did it. Then she changed back again. She needed Olaf’s memories if she was going to make any sense of the creature’s speech.

“You are -” it used a word neither she nor her borrowed body understood and in the confusion, she lost the right balance of attention and inattention that she had needed to understand and lost everything else it said.

“Again?” she said, finding the word in Olaf’s mind.

“Humans are gone from this place, why have you come?”

That was far too complicated a question for her to answer. Finding that lone word had been hard enough. Explaining the accidental portal and the reasons that they couldn’t travel was far more difficult. She just shrugged.

“Will you bring others of your kind?”

It used the same word again, the one that Olaf didn’t know but she didn’t let that throw her concentration this time. She shook her head no. That wasn’t her intention. She wanted gone from this place and to never come back and besides, she was the only one of her kind. Whatever she was, there weren’t any others for her to bring.

“Bring them!” A voice from her left called.

She flinched and spun, scrambling in the snow as she tried to turn and stand at the same time. Her boots couldn’t get purchase for a moment but then she was up. Adrenaline made Olaf’s body faster but she still felt slow and clumsy. Her hand tightened on the hilt of the blade but she stopped herself from pulling it out and brandishing it about.

A little swarm of the creatures had gathered behind her. They looked like very strange, very ugly children’s dolls. Small and thin. They should have looked harmless but the sharpness of their faces, the numbers of them, the isolation, all those dead bodies. They were far from harmless.

“Bring them,” another of them repeated.

The words were picked up, bandied back and forth by the crowd in a chorus of chattering voices. Tessa took a step away from them but that brought her closer to the trees, not the cabin and the possibility of help. They moved as a mass, with all the organization of a swarm of ants. Blue and chaotic and screaming the words back and forth over and over again.

She had been an idiot to come out here alone.

She pushed that thought away and scrambled through the borrowed memories of her change for another single word.

“Why?” she asked.

“There are no humans here,” was one response.

“There are none of your kind here,” was another.

“The blood is gone from this place. The blood carries no more iron. No more. The iron. The holes in the ground and the rivers of red.”

The voices blurred together and she lost the level of focus it had taken to understand them. They were a haze of sounds and nothing more.

“Stop it!” she said in English spinning to look at them again.

“Bring them!” she recognized these words without help and they came in chorus again.

The one who stood alone yelled a command in a different language, something slippery and made up of sounds that human mouths couldn’t form. The others fell silent. Tessa half turned so she could see the leader without looking away from the horde. It could have been closer. She hadn’t seen them move but they seemed closer.

She scrambled for focus as it started to talk again, “-passage if you bring back the humans. The humans bring the red river.”

“Why?” she asked. It wasn’t quite the question she wanted to ask but it was the only word she had on her tongue. Passage to where? What river? How was she supposed to bring back the humans? Why did they think she would?

“The storm is ours, we are the keepers of the storm. Passage through the storm is granted only to those who have our favour,” it said.

“Humans?” she said picking the word out of the things that he had said.

“The iron in the ground is cold and hard and dead. The iron of the red clouds is strong and alive. Alive and it is a gift to us. It is ours. Bring it back to us. The red clouds. The red river. Ours.”

“Bring us more,” the voices behind her said. They spoke over each other, other words and phrases getting lost in the chaos and confusion.

“You take it from humans?” she asked but it came out in English.

They were still chattering and now she was sure that they were moving and rather than a line behind her, they were forming a loose ring around her that was closing in. Tessa wasn’t quite sure how they took iron from humans but it killed the ones they had done it to and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. She backed away from them another step and then forced herself to stop.

She had never had to fight a faerie. She had rarely fought anything. For all the training that she had been doing, she had not gone out on any official business. The fight with the Dark Sisters, the fire at De Quincey’s, even the battle where Nate had died, it had never fallen to her fighting skills to protect her life but she didn’t know how to talk her way out of this and she didn’t have Will or Jem there to offer protection.

The faeries were little. There were lots of them but they were little and disorganized. They were yelling and demanding like spoiled children who had been denied a treat. They were not something for her to fear. Just spoiled little blue brats. Nothing to fear. Nothing.

She turned back towards them. They stood between her and the cabin, going deeper into the trees was going to put her in greater danger.

Nothing she knew about knife fights was going to help her against knee high creatures but she ran through it in her mind regardless. She held the knife properly as she watched the circling crowd. Maybe they wouldn’t try anything, if they wanted her to bring more humans to this place then they couldn’t kill her. That felt more and more like empty optimism as they got closer.

They weren’t well organized enough for that kind of strategy. Their chaos made them more dangerous than they might have been. The leader had only passing control over them.

“I am going home now,” she said aloud even if they wouldn’t understand her.

She took a step towards the crowd and they surged back and then held just outside of her reach. She hadn’t let the blade out of her pocket yet. She took another step.

Then another.

They surged back but not as far each time.

Tessa didn’t think she’d be able to push them all the way to the edge of the trees just like this. She squeezed the knife hilt and took a few deep breaths and tried to make a better plan. She considered all the changes she had and tried to decide which one would be fastest in snow like this.

She pushed that thought to the side. They skittered over the surface of the snow, she didn’t have a single change in her repertoire that wouldn’t sink down with every step or burst into flame in the sunlight. There was no way to be faster than they were.

She took another deep breath and yelled, “Will!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a plotty side-serving to the main dish of angst angst angst.


	17. Blood Iron

Jem waved him off and he pulled his hat down over his ears and gave a theatrical bow. Jem laughed and Will turned to head off into the snow and go find Tessa. He adjusted his mittens one more time outside the door and listened to the faint sounds of the bed creaking as Jem settled back down to rest again. Will knew him. Will knew when he was trying to keep his illness out of everyone else's way as though it were an inconvenience. He was sicker than he was letting on and he wanted to save his energy for pretending to be find when Tessa got back.

There was a dull thud. Jem had thrown something at the door. Will hit the same spot with the heel of his hand and heard laughter from inside. He made a show of stomping across the porch as he set out into the snow. If Jem wanted to hear him leave, he would make as much sound as possible.

When Jem had made the decision to stop searching for a cure, Will had recoiled but he had accepted it because it was what Jem wanted. He put his time and energy into finding ways to help make the short time that Jem had the best that it could be. If he had been able to choose between a short good life and a long cursed one, he would have made the same decision so how could he fault Jem for it?

Accepting the decision and accepting the reality were not the same thing. Charlotte had told him that. He hadn't quite understood what she meant by it at the time but he did now. Jem's decision had been made for the right reasons but the reality was setting in now. He would die young. He would die before his own wedding day. Will took a deep breath of wood smoke and cold air and then set off at a run as though he could out pace his own thoughts.

He set his feet into the path that Tessa had left but it was hard to run in snow. It took all his attention and all his balance to keep himself upright and moving forward through the powder. He didn't have far to go but the feeling of pushing all his energy into running made him feel better for at least a moment. He corrected his balance as his foot started to slip again and aimed his next step better to hit the path that she had left and keep himself from falling and looking like a fool.

He missed it the first time she called. He heard the unfamiliar voice on the wind but had to stop and listen again.

His name.

"Tessa?" he called back but didn't get an answer.

He was close enough to hear the sound of footsteps in the forest now that his own boots were no longer pounding into the snow. He ran towards the sound. He could see the feathery birdlike footprints in the sand as he stepped into the shadows of the trees. Tessa and Jem had described the prints but he hadn't been prepared for how many there were. Jem had used the word swarm but the word hadn't had any meaning until he could see the crisscrossing paths running between the tree trunks and under the fallen branches.

He could see movement ahead and heard a branch snap. He pulled out his seraph blade. He hadn't expected the faeries to be dangerous to anyone but mundanes who couldn't see them coming but he wanted to appear dangerous. He wanted to be ready if he had underestimated them.

Tessa, in a man's voice, screamed.

He broke into the clearing just after she fell. She still wore the body of the miner from the cabin. A round old man kicking at a giant swarm of tiny blue shapes that swarmed over her in such numbers that she couldn't throw them off. They moved as one. Crawling back and forth, towards her and then scampering back to escape from a kicking foot. They flowed up a tree and then down again. Chaos. Blue and white and hard to see against all the white and gray of the forest.

Will called out a warning in English but the faeries didn't respond. He tried again in the ancient Celtic of the faerie courts. Still nothing. They didn't look up.

He closed the last few steps and swung the blade through the faeries on the edge of the melee. They shrieked and scattered in front of him as he cut through the nearest ones but others surged in around him. It was like fighting water. Water with little claws that was trying to climb his legs. He swore and kicked and hit them with his free hand as well as the sword.

“Tessa!” he yelled. She had stopped yelling and terror hit him as he swung into the faeries again.

The faeries bled red. Red splattered across the snow where they winked in and of view in the shadow streaked snow between the trees. Red against the blue and gray. Will could barely see Tessa. There were elegant battles and there were battles where you just hacked with a sword in hopes of living through it. This was the latter. All he could think of was getting close enough to Tessa to pull her out.

A red haze was building over the crowd and he pushed into it a little farther.

The air was wrong.

Misty. Hazy.

Red.

Blood.

There was blood in the air like fog. 

“Tessa!”

He reached for her. The faeries pushed into and over him. They climbed up his legs and clawed at his hair and he had to bat them away from his face. He grabbed hold of her right before she screamed and rolled.

She rolled away from him.

He called her name again.

And she went up in flames.

Will yelled in surprise and fear as the space where her body had been erupted into fire. The faeries shrieked in one cacophonous voice and retreated. Will pushed past the faeries as soon as they started to move. he body in the flames rolled again and the worst of the fire faded to small patches on her clothes.

The fog fell like rain, blood rain with little bits of hail and ice mixed into it that ticked as it hit the ground. A large piece bounced off her shoulder and rolled to the ground.

She was crying, gasping and shuddering as he reached her. There were patches of her clothing that was still on fire and he patted it out with snow while she leaned against his side and breathed hard as she caught her breath. The ground around them was wet with melted snow and blood that had fallen from the cloud like rain. 

“Are you hurt?” Will asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I thought I would die.”

He looked up in case there was still any danger in the clearing but victims that caught fire were terrifying enough to scare the little monsters away. The snow was still crisscrossed with footprints and there were splashes of blood against the white but that was the only evidence that they had been there at all.

“What did they do to you?”

“They were taking his blood. My blood.”

“And then the fire?”

“That was me,” she said.

“You did that on purpose?” Will asked.

“I turned into Camille. She’s a vampire. You can’t take blood from a vampire.”

“It is at least ten in the morning,” Will told her.

“I forgot that. I was going to pass out. It was the only change I could remember,” she said.

She had lost a lot of blood but like that day in the sanctuary when he had thought she had died, it wasn’t her blood. The blood on the snow belonged to Olaf. Tessa herself was shaken but unhurt. She wasn’t even badly burned. The melting snow had kept the clothing from catching once she had changed back into her own body.

“It was effective but I can’t say I recommend doing it again,” Will said.

“You’re going to be fussy about me going out for water from here on out, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Are you making jokes?”

“If I don’t make jokes I have to think about faeries pulling my blood out of my veins and I don’t want to think about that,” she told him.

“Inappropriately timed jokes are my specialty. I don’t take kindly to you stealing that from me.”

“You make the jokes then,” she said.

“Did you hear the one about the bishop and the tavern?”

“Ugh,” she said.

Tessa started to laugh. It was a shaky sound that was almost a sob and made him wrap his arms around her more tightly. They sat in the hollow in the snow as the water started to refreeze around them. Will was cold but he didn’t want to let go of her yet.

“What’s this?” Tessa picked up a little ball of something dull gray and held it up.

“A rock?”

“There are lots of them,” she said. 

Peppered around them in the leaves were balls of the same dull material. Will pulled off a glove and rolled one between his fingers. It felt like a rock but it was familiar enough now that he was looking at it. He wanted to compare it against the chunks of metal that had brought them here before he announced his opinion so he gathered up a few and tucked them into his pocket.

“Onto more important topics, I am quite serious, The Bishop joke is hilarious.”

“I doubt that,” Tessa said.

Will helped her to her feet and she was right. The joke was terrible but she gave him a little smile as he got to the punchline. Will told her the most ridiculous jokes he knew and then moved onto limericks of questionable provenance as they made their way back.

The forest had fallen silent around them. The fae were gone leaving nothing but footprints to mark their passage. These were not true faerie warriors, the were almost animals. They made Will’s skin crawl more than he had thought possible. Downworlders had become a fact of his life and even demons had started to fail to bring out this kind of reaction. He was angry. Angry was expected. He was also disgusted and horrified and scared. He was scared of the damn things.

Jem was on the porch and he came down to meet them as they came across the snow. Will grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around and pushed him back towards the house. Jem let himself be dragged along as he touched Tessa’s face and asked questions.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Faerie bastard swarm,” Will said.

“Do those words make sense? Tess?” Jem said

“There are a lot of them. They attacked me,” she said.

Jem’s expression shifted to an emotion so carefully balanced between rage and terror that Will reached out and grabbed his hand.

“I’m fine,” Tessa said.

“She’s leaving out the best part. Which is that she set them on fire,” Will said.

“You did what?” Jem said.

“Can we go inside? I need a cup of tea and to sit down, please,” Tessa said.

Jem backed away and ushered her into the room. Will told the part of the story that he had seen while she changed and Jem boiled water for tea. Her clothing had scorch marks but she insisted that she wasn’t injured. Will held her sweater which smelled of dust and scorched wool and frowned at her as she told him again that she didn’t need medicine.

Once she was finally curled up on the bed with her hair brushed and her cup of tea held firmly in both hands, she looked up at them. Jem sat down beside her and wrapped an arm around her back. She turned until she could rest her head on his chest. Will watched her but the rush of jealous loneliness that usually came with watching them together didn’t appear.

Tessa started to talk.

“They undoubtedly hurt - no, they undoubtedly killed those people in the village and they can control the storm. They use it to drive people here and keep them from leaving,” Tessa said.

“Why?”

“Blood? Something about the red cloud and the red river. I couldn’t make much sense of it. I could barely make sense of what they were saying through the change and they don’t really have a leader, they just all talk in a rush.”

Will got up to dig in his jacket for the little balls that had been left in the faerie’s wake. He dropped them on the bed. The largest ones were the size of peas, the smallest ones closer to sesame seeds. They were a dull gray like pebbles or dirt. If Will hadn’t watched them rain down out of the red haze over Tessa’s body, he wouldn’t have thought twice about them. Each one was an innocuous little thing.

“Red cloud makes sense. The air above you when they had you trapped on the ground was tinged red like fog. If they were pulling blood out of your body, they were doing something with it in the air,” Will said.

“And what are these?” Jem asked picking one up and rolling it in his fingers.

“These were left behind when the faeries ran away,” Will said.

“They’re iron. They mentioned living iron or something about the iron in the ground being cold and dead,” Tessa said.

“Blood iron,” Jem said.

Will nodded.

“Mortmain would use blood iron, the bastard,” Will said.

Will and Jem tried to explain it all to Tessa. Blood iron was illegal. Not just according to Clave law but according to the law of the fae themselves. There was iron in the blood of all red blooded creatures and there were those among the fae who had mastered the art of pulling it out of the blood so that it could be smelted. That it came from living creatures and not from the ground meant that they could wield it themselves.

It was powerful. It could be enchanted in ways that regular irons could not. There had been a time when the Faerie courts had created blood iron to create weapons but for reasons that had never been explained to outsiders, it was outlawed in a peace treaty between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts centuries ago. The Clave had declared it illegal themselves just for good measure. It was usually made from human blood and for that reason alone the Clave wouldn’t abide by it.

Will went to fetch one of the pieces of iron that had brought them through the portal in the first place. It was the same dull dark as the pebbles. It didn’t hold heat the way that metal objects usually did. Will held the piece in his hand and it didn’t warm.

The portal hadn’t brought them to Mortmain’s factory like Henry had expected. It had brought them to the place where the metal itself had originated. The chunk in Will’s hand was made with the blood of all those dead frozen people in the town. He carefully dropped it on the bed far away from everyone.

“Why would Mortmain use faerie iron in the automatons?” Tessa asked. 

“It conducts magic. Most metals resist magic. Not just faerie magic but all magic. Shadowhunter runes can be carved into metal and some warlocks have runic languages that can be used on metal too but it’s very hard to just cast a spell on a piece of metal. It’s a theory for why pistols can’t carry runes. We can rune a blade but we can’t rune a bullet.,” Jem said.

“Besides he probably likes the idea of using illegal things just to make the Clave angry. It’s a way of flaunting our authority. The Shadowhunters can’t control what I do. They’re not the boss of me. He’s like a petulant child,” Will said.

“All those people are dead because of him,” Tessa said. “That’s why everyone is dead, that’s why they’re so desperate for us to bring more people. Whatever Mortmain gave them for the iron, they want more of it.”

“Well they can’t have it from us,” Jem said.

“I doubt they’ll try again after what Tessa did to them,” Will said.

He wasn’t sure he really believed that and the expression on Jem’s face that he didn’t either. Tessa just sat still and quiet turning a large piece of the blood iron over and over in her hands with a pained expression on her face. Jem kissed her temple and for a little while they sat in a tight silent knot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact, "You're not the boss of me," isn't an anachronism. I looked it up. It first appears in a book in 1883 which means it was conceivably a phrasing used as a joke before that point. It's not a tv show reference or something. 
> 
> Yes, that's the kind of stuff my brain decides is deeply important and requires research. 
> 
> The bit about metal being difficult to enchant isn't directly out of canon (though Jace talks about bullets in City of Bones) but I think it makes sense within the canon we're given. Most Shadowhunter weapons are made of ... that special stuff the Iron Sisters use ... ADAMAS, runed blades are a thing but don't seem to be the strongest available weapons. We rarely see downworlders with metal weapons so making the jump to "because metal weapons aren't better than claws and teeth" seems reasonable. 
> 
> *ramble ramble*  
> *wanders off to go to bed*


	18. A Last Good Morning

Jem woke up to the sense that the world was closing in on him and he could barely breathe. He tried to push lose of it but the weakness in his limbs made that impossible. He finally managed to get a hand up to push the blankets away from his face and get a gasp of air. He could barely breathe. His lungs burned but he couldn't even find the energy to cough as he sucked in ineffectual breaths.

The air went in but it didn't do any good.

His body had forgotten how to use air.

This was what dying felt like.

"Will," he said.

It was barely a word but Will was right there and maybe Jem's panic was filtering down the parabatai bond or maybe he wasn't sleeping anyways. Will didn’t sleep enough. The worry about Will fluttered at the edges of his narrow attention. Will rolled up on his elbow, his face calm and curious for a second before he made eye contact with Jem.

"Look at me," he said.

Jem had thought that he was looking at Will but no. No, his eyes had fallen shut. He didn’t remember closing them. He sucked in another gasp of useless air and forced his eyes open. Will was there for a moment then gone. A rush of cold air as he moved away and rummaged for something over the edge of the bed. Jem's eyes fell shut again as he tried, by sheer force of will, to compel his lungs to work the way they were meant to.

Then Will was back again. He pulled Jem's shirt at the collar hard enough to pop a button lose. Jem registered that detail as though it were essential. The button would be lost. It would need to be repaired. Where would they buy a new button in a place like this? Maybe they could find it. It was probably still in the sheets.

He was losing his grip on reality. On consciousness.

The burn of the stele didn't register as strongly as the missing button had. The stupid button. It wasn't his shirt. He hadn't any right to ruin it. Then the rune started to take effect. An iratze on his chest, that's what Will had done. The gasps of air started to work.

The iratze was a stop gap. As nearly useless as a plaster on a fatal wound but for a little while it would be enough. For a little while air filtered in and out and his vision cleared.

Will's hand was there on his chest, where the rune had been laid and his breathing was as fast as Jem's was. He slowed down a breath at a time and Jem tried to match his rhythm until they were breathing normally. Will kept his hand there. They were almost nose to nose and Jem leaned in against the protest of his muscles to rest his forehead against Will's.

"Don't die," Will said.

"I don't think that wish is within my ability to grant," Jem croaked.

"Don't die right now."

"I'll do my best."

"I need you. I don't know how to do this with out you."

"This?"

"I don't know how to be a person without you. I don't know how to live in a world that doesn't have you."

"Now you're being dramatic," Jem said in a whisper.

Will sighed and shook his head and fell silent. Jem kept his eyes open. It was easier to match his breathing with Will’s if he could see him. Jem had always known that his death would leave a mark on others and he knew that it would leave the deepest scars on Will but there was something terrifying about looking that pain in the face. It was all written there in Will’s eyes.

A part of him wanted to throw the same kinds walls that Will had always thrown. Jem could push the guilt away and put the blame on Will for having become parabatai with a dying man in the first place. There was another corner of his mind that thought maybe there was a right thing to say, a word or phrase that could ease Will through this. The loudest part of him wanted to pretend that it wasn't happening until it was over. It would get worse as his body failed around him but eventually he'd just pass out and never wake up again.

"I'm sorry you have to be here for this," Jem said. He took a breath of air that smelled like Will and said, "But I am grateful to have had you in this life of mine and to have you here with me now. I cannot simply refuse to die because I do not want to die. If that had ever been an option, I would have taken it. I am grateful for every moment we have shared. I love you William."

"Now who's being dramatic," Will said and there was something thick and heavy in his voice though he wasn't crying. Will didn't cry. Jem had never seen him cry. Jem laughed. Weak and harsh but it was a laugh. Will echoed it. Neither of them sounded amused. Will propped himself up to look at him. He wasn't crying but on anyone else that expression would have come with tears. Jem reached up and touched his face as though he was wiping tears away.

Will didn't say anything so Jem pulled him back down. He had planned to rest their heads together again but instead he pulled Will in close and kissed him.

"What was that for?" Will asked.

"Because I still get the urge to do it sometimes," Jem said.

"You are married."

"Engaged."

"That doesn't make kissing other people acceptable."

Will was right and Jem pressed his face into Will's neck instead of kissing him again. Closeness was enough. Will had been his first kiss. His only kiss before he'd met Tessa. They'd agreed to leave it in the past when they'd gotten older. They were parabatai and what had once been a childish game between a pair of lonely boys was had become a line that couldn't be crossed. Jem had meant it. He had thought about doing it since they'd agreed that they wouldn't.

Tessa had slept through the whispers and Jem was glad of it. If Will was this worried, Tessa would be worse. She worried more than he did. No. Maybe she just showed it more than he did. Hopefully, Jem would be able to hold onto this bit of coherent consciousness long enough to see her this morning as well.

Maybe it wouldn't be his last good morning.

Maybe.

But maybe it would be the last morning either good or bad.

He held onto Will with strength he didn't have and tried to catch his breath. He wasn't panicking because he couldn't breathe this time but the fluttering of panic was there in his chest nonetheless. He took in deep breaths and kept each one matched to Will’s. Will was wrapped around him and Jem relaxed into the feeling of being held close like this. Tessa was there on his other side. He shifted so he could feel her against his back without pulling away from Will.

He was going to die. It was not an abstract concept. It was an impending and inescapable truth. This was what dying felt like. These were the only goodbyes he was going to get. It had been coming for him for so long that he'd largely let the dread go. Dying had become such part of his life that it was inconvenient rather than horrifying.

Now he had to categorize the moments he had left.

His last kiss. His last breakfast. His last sunrise. He'd already played his last song on the violin and he couldn't remember what it was. Last. Last. Last. And then it would be over.

This was the end. It scared him more than he was willing to admit. His fear would just make Will and Tessa more upset so he broke it down into a list of lasts so that each one carried weight but none of them could carry all the weight of that fear. He didn’t want to be afraid of it. It was a part of life. What went up, came down. What lived, would die. That was how it was. It was like fearing sunset. It was inevitable.

But each last thing. Those he feared. Death came with so many smaller endings.

"I don't fear dying," he said in Chinese into the hollow under Will's ear because it was true and once he understood it he needed to say it or it would just bounce around his head until it destroyed any chance he had at remaining calm.

"I know," Will said.

"I fear what I will leave behind. I hate that I have no way of knowing whether she'll be safe, whether you'll be safe."

"We will be."

Jem nodded. It sounded nice but it was hardly a truth just because Will said it. Will had also asked him not to die as though the words alone had some power. They didn’t. Not to save his life. Not to protect theirs.

"I won't let anything happen to her," Will said with a little more force.

"I know," Jem said.

He did know. If he had the choice, he wouldn't be leaving but that wasn't the choice he had been granted and if this was all he had then leaving Tessa under Will's protection was the best he could ask for. She would keep him from doing anything rash and he would keep her safe. They'd be a good match. They'd be able to make it through the storm if they were together.

"Are you alright?" Tessa's voice cut through the mounting haze in Jem's thoughts. He was going to fall asleep again and now that the idea that he might not wake from it clawed at his thoughts. He turned to her and nodded. He was lying but Will would let him lie about this to her. Will’s body language shifted. Slightly. So slightly but enough that he didn’t seem to be clinging on for dear life anymore.

"He's being dramatic this morning," Will said.

"Will started it."

"I did not."

Jem smiled and snuck in a last hug before he let Will move away from him. Will made an apology or an excuse and tugged on his boots to go outside and get more wood. They had enough but no one argued with him.

"It's bad," Tessa said into the quiet as the door swung shut.

"Yes, but that doesn't mean that this moment needs to be anything but perfect," Jem said.

"Do we get tomorrow?" she asked.

"I hope so."

She didn’t like that answer, it was written across her face. He leaned over and kissed her. She was too gentle when she kissed him back. She was worried. She had a right to be. He kissed her a little harder and tugged her closer. He wasn’t strong enough to roll over and wrap his arms around her but she did the work for him and rolled into his arms so all he had to do was close them around her.

“I’m going to fall asleep again,” he admitted.

“Give me another kiss,” she said.

He laughed a little and did as he was told. Her skin felt cool to the touch which meant his fever was back and his own skin was hot but he ignored that and kissed her again. She settled down against his chest when his eyes fluttered shut and he couldn’t force them open again.

“In some other life, we’ll get a townhouse and decorate it in blues and yellow and white so it would be bright and cheerful,” Tessa said.

Jem smiled but didn’t interrupt her.

“With flower boxes in the windows and cherry trees on the lawn. And we can bring that onerous cat of yours with us but he’s not sleeping in our bed.”

Jem chuckled and concentrated on his breathing and her voice everything else was fading. His joints hurt, his lungs felt fragile and papery even as the iratze kept them pulling in air, his skin was too hot. He concentrated on her so he wouldn’t have to think about the pain.

“In that other world, I’m not a warlock or whatever it is that I am and we’ll have three children. We’ll have an argument over naming the first boy after Will but you’ll win because it’s a good name even if it will make Will himself insufferable for years. You’ll teach them to speak Chinese and I’ll read them stories past their bedtimes…”

She was still talking but the words were fading into dreams. They were good dreams about townhouses with flowers in the windows and the halting sounds of a child learning their bow positions on a violin. The dream even blotted out the pain in his body and let him sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always think, "Oh, this is the angstiest thing I've ever written" and then a few months later, I write something like this.
> 
> Are we having fun yet? Did I tag this story for angst? I should go make sure that I did.


	19. Tolerable

Will was staring at the snow and thinking about how cold his fingers were. It was manageable. He could think about that. He could think about the way the drifts cast blue shadows and the way the sunlight sparkled off the powder. That was tolerable. The cold wasn't as bad as it had been but it still bit at his skin and left him stretching and flexing to try and keep the blood moving. The world around them was beautiful and deadly.

Jem hated the cold. He always had. He didn't complain about it but there would be months in the winter when he could barely play the violin or throw a knife because the cold made his joints ache. He would get quiet and frustrated and would hide it away behind acts of kindness as though he could erase his own discomfort by lessening someone else's.

Will got surly when he was frustrated. He played it up because it fit with the person he needed to be to keep everyone else away but the annoyance was genuine. Even at his best, punching people felt like a very good idea when he had an injury that wouldn't heal or he'd heard a family speaking Welsh in the park or he was worried that he'd let someone see too much of his good side. The curse made his worst impulses something useful.

But Jem was different. Jem sat with Henry and helped him sort equipment. Will went out to a bar and goaded people bigger than him into a fight and ended up coming home with a split lip and bleeding knuckles. Even at his best, Will couldn’t touch the kind of good that Jem was effortlessly.

If there was someone the world needed, it was Jem. It certainly wasn't people like Will.

And yet, he wasn't the one who woke up with his lungs barely able to pull in air.

There was nothing Will could do and it was killing him as the minutes ticked down. None of his maddest plans were plausible enough to even attempt. There was no way out of this wasteland that Jem could conceivably survive. Tessa's attempt as Camille hadn't even crossed Will's mind. He hadn't even been able to come up with plan that was that plausible. She hadn’t made it but at least her reasoning had been sound. Idiotic but sound. He had nothing. Jem was going to die and Will wouldn't even be able to claim that he had done everything possible.

There had to be something else to be done. Some attempt. Some plan he was missing.

His answer was to stand in the cold and lean against the support beam and scuff the toe of his boot against the drift of snow that had invaded the little porch. As though that could fix it. He stood and he turned everything he had ever read over and over in his head. Books on magic and herbs and primitive mundane medicines. He turned over the memories of the mining town full of corpses and of the storm that had nearly killed Tessa.

He looked towards the woods and wondered after the faeries. There wasn't any faerie magic that could help Jem. They'd tried some potions and magics back when they'd all still thought there was a hope for a cure. If the best magic that could be cajoled out of the Seelie court hadn't been any use, what possible good could a pack of near feral little monsters possibly do?

Will sighed.

The door opened and he didn't turn to look at her.

The door closed again and he still couldn't face her.

He had nothing to offer her.

No plan, no reassurance. Nothing at all.

He had failed Jem and he had failed Tessa too. The expression on her face whenever Jem wasn't looking was horrible. She hid the look away when Jem was looking at her. Will had only seen it in flashes before she'd made the attempt to get through the storm but it had been firmly in place when she'd changed back into herself in those snow crusted clothes and it had been there in the morning before Jem had turned his attention to her and she'd given him a smile.

If he turned to look at her, she was going to be looking at him with all his buried feelings of grief and uselessness written across his face and he wasn't sure he could face her.

She pulled in a slow breath and still he didn't turn around. She let the breath out again and it caught in a near sob.

That undid him.

He had nothing to offer her but he turned to meet her gaze. She stood just outside the door, wearing heavy boots that didn't fit and a sweater pulled on over a wool dress. Her hair was still rumpled from sleep. She didn't look like the girl he had come to expect her to be but she was still undoubtedly his Tessa. Strong and kind and stubborn. Incredibly intelligent but dangerously impulsive when someone else's life was on line.

He reached out his hand to her.

Not his Tessa.

That thought had crept in past everything else. She didn’t belong to him and never would but his heart was already hers. He would do anything she needed him to. There was nothing in his power that would help her. He held out his hand because it was all he had to offer.

She looked at it for a moment of time that stretched and wavered, then she flung herself into his arms. He stumbled in surprise as she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face into his neck. He caught her and pulled her in close before he had made sense of what had just happened. Her breathing was uneven and all he could do was hold onto her.

“Jem’s asleep again,” she said.

“We’ll let him rest,” Will said.

Her voice was flat when she said the words and his wasn’t much better. If she hadn’t had her hands fisted tightly in the back of his jacket, he might have thought she was calm. There was nothing calm in the way she held her shoulders or the way she was pressed against his chest.

"He's going to die in my arms," Tessa whispered.

Will almost stopped breathing. Even in his own thoughts, he hadn’t actually used the word. There were things Jem could or could not survive. Jem was getting worse. Jem’s breathing was laboured. All of these things were true but Will had never let himself think through to where those statements ended. They all ended with the words, “because Jem was dying.”

"He's going to die in my arms, I'm going to feel the moment -" she shivered.

"Everything-" Will started but that was a lie so he tried again, "You will-" but he didn't want to say that. "You won't be alone."

She nodded and the uneven breathing finally broke into very quiet sobs that shook through her. She held on as though they were caught in a current and he was her only anchor. Will turned them both away from the view of the forest and pulled her towards the wall where the weathered wood of the porch was clear of snow. He sat down and pulled her along with him. 

Neither of them were ready to go back inside so he pulled her close and they sank down to the ground. She curled up on his lap and he held onto her as she cried. The tears were quiet and buried against his shirt but each near silent sob made her shoulders shake.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't remember wallowing in the angst so much when I was drafting this story. I think it's because I wrote it piecemeal and then stitched it together later. So I'd have another thought for a scene and write that out too until I had 9 billion words of misery. If there was a character moment in it that I liked (like Will comparing himself to Jem in this one) I just kept the whole chapter even if I already had a chapter where we established something. This could have been cut down and rolled into the next chapter but then I'd lose Will's introspective wallowing because that one is Tessa's POV. 
> 
> So I kept them both. 
> 
> *rolls about in the misery of fictional characters*
> 
> bwahahaha. 
> 
> I'm going to post two chapters today to push us out of "wallowing in angst" and into the next phase of the story. (also it's the last week of the session this week and I have lesson plans due and tests to grade so there's a good chance there will be slow updates this week so you get an extra few thousand words of angst to tide you over).


	20. Dark Silver

Tessa pulled herself back together slowly. The pieces of her self control were scattered and fragmented and it took a long time to gather them back together. Will didn’t rush her or complain. Her feet were freezing and he had been outside longer than she had but he was quiet and still and let her lean her head against his shoulder while he held the remaining pieces in place with one arm around her back and his other hand curled in both of hers.

This wasn’t who she was going to be when she went back through that door. Jem needed her to be stronger than this. She took long slow breaths of cold air until her sobs became just breathing again. Just air in and air out. She had cried all over Will’s shirt and the tears were freezing on her cheeks and on the fabric and she rubbed at them, trying to brush away the evidence of the panic that had struck her.

“We need to go back inside,” she said and her voice only shook a little bit.

“I know,” he said.

“I hate-” she started and then let the words fall off because saying it out loud, admitting that there was nothing to do, would set her back down the path of tears and she didn’t want to have to do that.

“I know.”

She nodded and slowly untangled herself from him. They helped each other stand. Her fingers and toes and the wet places on her face ached from the cold. Will caught her face between his hands and leaned in. He stopped and she closed the last of the distance to rest her forehead against his. He was close enough to kiss and she had to push that thought violently out of her head.  

“Thank you,” he said.

“For ruining your shirt?” she asked. It was almost a joke. It almost sounded like a joke.

“No, for loving him that much,” Will said.

“How could I not? Everyone loves him.”

“Not like that. Everyone loves Jem. Everyone thinks it is a tragedy but it’s not the same. People love the idea of Jem. The tragic story of the orphan boy. I’ve thought before that maybe I was the only person who could see all of him. But you do,” Will said.

“I don’t know if anyone really sees all of anyone,” Tessa said.

“Maybe not,” Will admitted, “But you see more of him than most people do and you love him for it. And I’m glad that he has you.”

Tessa nodded and squeezed Will’s hands. She didn’t remember lifting her hands to hold his as he held her face carefully. She pulled back first and he dropped his hands and stepped away from her.

There was something painful in his eyes and she looked away from it before it could pull her back from the fragile calm she had found. Will’s sorrow was tinted with anger even more than her own was but that didn’t make it any easier to maintain her composure when he was falling apart in front of her. She had to turn away from him if she was going to maintain herself.

Will opened the door for her and she stepped back into the warmth of the cabin. For a moment it was a relief and she started towards the stove to warm her hands.

There was something very wrong in the room.

She froze. The tears that she hadn’t managed to wipe away were melting on her cheeks but she barely noticed. Tessa had heard of warlocks being able to feel or detect magic but that hadn't made any sense to her. The only magic she had ever been aware of was her own. She had never been able to make sense of the idea before. To be able to feel someone else’s magic had seemed like a fantasy but this she could feel.

This room was full of magic.

It was thick in air.

She froze in the middle of the door. Usually she was the one left scrambling for an explanation but Will made a confused noise as he bumped into her. The room looked as it always did. The jumble of broken wood in the corner from their attempts at home repairs. The fabric pasted over the windows and glowing in the sunlight. The pot of soup left out on the stove warmer with the lid on to keep dust out. The bed filling one corner of the room. Jem still lying still and quiet in it.

She turned to take a step towards him and Will caught her wrist and jerked her back behind him.

She still hadn’t figured out where the malevolent weight of the magic was coming from but Will was already moving to do something about it.   

She stumbled and by the time she had righted herself, Will had left her to clear the room in a blur. He had a seraph blade in hand by the time he rounded the stove and Tessa hadn't seen where it had come from. The blue light of it recast the shadows in the room. The soft pinks of the covered windows and the harsh white of the snow outside the still open door were eclipsed by the blue of the blade.

It took her eyes a moment to adjust.

There was something in the air.

It was the same red haze that she vaguely remembered hanging above her fading vision after the attack in the woods.

Blood.

That had been blood.

This was blood.

"No," she said.

She started to step forward but the space was small and getting closer would put her in Will's way. She was caught by the door, outside the radius of the glowing blade as Will whirled again. She couldn't even see what he was fighting. She knew they were there but she was too panicked to make the shapes make sense even though she knew what was happening. The faeries were small and moved fast and they were running away, shrieking at each other as they climbed up the walls as fast as shadows.

Another slash and the blade cut over Jem's sleeping form and something screamed. Will had hit another.

The red haze reflected the glow of the blade like misty mornings caught by sunlight. It was cast into rays of light and a curtain of shimmering droplets. It was blood. That thought cut through the dazzle of the strange tableau as the blood started to gather and fall like rain.

Will paused. There were at least two bodies on the ground. He had a faerie held in his hand and the blade, still lit, hung at his side in a loose grip, almost as thought he had forgotten it. Will was hissing at the faerie in a language Tessa couldn't even identify as it scrabbled at his hand with claws and teeth. He was bleeding but didn't so much as wince.

She pulled herself together and changed.

Will wasn't speaking in a language that this body understood but the Faerie was answering him back in the local language and Will didn’t understand it.  

"He says they give it back," Tessa said in Olaf's voice.

Will didn't look at her. He wasn’t surprised to find her at his side. He nodded and asked another question in that other language. The faerie had given up trying to bite him but it was still struggling. The faerie shrieked back a series of answers that went so fast she could only catch parts of it.

What she understood was enough.

"No," she said without translating.

She reached out to touch Jem’s wrist where it lay on the bed. She needed to touch him. They stood close enough to the bed that she could see how pale he was. Jem was always pale but not like this. His skin looked like paper.

"No what?" Will asked.

"He said that if we give them the metal, they'll let us, you and I, pass through the storm. They know that Jem is sick."

"It wants us to give them Jem," Will said.

Will made a sound that was nearly feral and growled out a response that left the faerie still and silent. He turned and threw the thing out the door and into the snow. In another context, it might have been funny but in spite of the pinwheeling arms and the shrieking and the impact into the snow bank, all Tessa felt was anger and terror.

"What did you to say to it?"

"That if any of them touched us again, I was going to kill every single one of them."

Tessa heard the answer but she was already turning to look at Jem. She was saying silent prayers to gods and angels and anything else that might be listening.

Let him be alive.

Jem was lying on his back in the bed with his eyes shut and his chest still rising and falling slowly, too slowly and shallowly to be healthy but the relief that he wasn't dead washed through her. She reached out and touched his hair. There was a splattering of blood on his hair and cheeks and the pillow case below him and at first, she thought that was all that she was seeing but she ran her fingers through his hair and the illusion didn't wipe away like wet blood.

"Will?" Tessa said.

Will made a noise but it wasn't anywhere near words. There was a kind of rage in him that made him seem dangerous. Tessa had never been afraid of Will though she knew how dangerous he could be. He had never set her on edge like this. He had annoyed her and upset her and broke her heart but he had never scared her. Now he made her want to shy away to protect herself.

She buried that fear. He was still her Will. She reached out and touched his arm to force his attention back to her. He made eye contact and she saw him force the anger back down so that his eyes were softer when they met hers. She kept her hand on his arm as she pointed down at Jem.

"Some of his hair is brown."

Will’s expression got harsh again as he looked down. Confusion became anger in a split second before the frown settled. Tessa wiped the splatter of blood off of Jem’s cheek and tried to ignore Will’s storm of emotion beside her. Will ran his fingers through Jem’s hair very gently, a featherlight touch as she he reached to pick up one of the little balls of iron left scattered on the bed beside him.

She rolled it between her fingers and turned it over in her palm. It was harder than a ball of clay might be but not as hard as any metal that she knew of. It held her finger print for a moment when she pressed it and then the surface faded back to smooth iridescent silvery white.

Tessa dug in her pocket, rummaging for the little pellets made from her own blood that she had picked up in the woods. She pulled one out and lay it on her palm.

“Look at it,” she said to Will.

“He’s blood isn’t human. It isn’t surprising that it’s different.”

“This isn’t a little different. Shadowhunters are still human. Your blood isn’t that different from ours,” she said then corrected, “Theirs.”

If Will heard the little hesitation in her voice when she did, he didn’t mention it.

“He’s sicker. Whatever they did was not an improvement, Tess,” Will said.  

“I know. What did the faerie say?”

“I didn’t understand it,” Will said. “It understood the Ancient Celtic of the courts but it didn’t answer in it.”

“I know that,” Tessa said and let some of her exasperation slip into her voice. Her own thoughts were more than she could handle. Will’s anger was rubbing at her own and making it hard to stay calm, “I know but your memory is better than mine. Is it good enough to remember the sounds?”

Will stared at her and she tapped his collarbone through his shirt. She wasn’t sure if she exactly remembered where the memosyne rune was but if it would give him near perfect recall of things he had read, why not things he had seen or heard as well? He frowned down at Jem but his expression was far away.

“William.”

He snapped his gaze up to her. Using his full name was a trick that Jem pulled on him and she was pretty sure that it wasn’t welcome from he but she didn’t regret it. He was present in the conversation again. She needed him to help her with this.

“I’m going to change. Repeat it for me. It went too fast for me to get everything,” she switched bodies again. She was tired and the change was getting harder to hold but she ignored that thread of exhaustion pulling at her attention. It was emotional exhaustion more than physical. She could control her emotions a little bit longer.

The process of Will repeating what he could remember and her raking Olaf’s memories to translate it was slow and messy. They were both frustrated. Jem’s breathing was the background music to it all. Her attention kept leaping to the rafters to be sure that the faeries weren’t coming back.

“They called it Dark Silver this time. Not Blood Iron. They say they give the blood back so it is fair.”

“They give back blood that doesn’t do anything. The iron in the blood is a necessary part. You can’t just take it out.” Will said. “They kill people. They can’t have him.”

“Will,” she said. His expression calmed a little as he turned back to her. She started to say something, to put the thoughts together but nothing in her mind made sense yet. She opened her mouth and all that came out was a sigh. The phrases were echoing in her head. Blood iron. Dark silver. The words were tangled with other thoughts. The fine mist of blood hanging in the air. The feeling of the blood being pulled from her body in the woods. The sound of Jem’s breathing. Blood iron. Dark silver. She shook her head but it didn’t help.

“Sit with him, he’s going to get cold. I’m going to make something to eat,” she said. Tessa squeezed his hand and then went to see what they had to eat in the kitchen. Work would help. She needed to do something to help her think straight. She needed to put this plan together better than the last one. The plan to escape as Camille had been a good idea but she hadn't been able to do it. This needed to be better. They needed it to work. They were running out of time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To those of you who called where I was going with faerie blood magic thing: *finger guns*


	21. A Nightmare

Will woke from the nightmare and for a moment couldn't tell the difference. He was a child and he was not. It was Ella who was dying and it was Jem. It was his mother's voice calling his name and it was Tessa's. The room was dark but he'd drawn a night vision rune because he was supposed to be watching to see if the Faeries came crawling back up the walls.

He had fallen asleep. Now he wasn't sure if he was awake. He was sitting up with his back against the head board and his head had dropped to rest against the wall for only a moment. He didn’t remember closing his eyes.

"Will," she said again and he finally pulled himself together enough to locate her in the dark.

"Tess," he answered.

The night vision rune had left the world drawn in black and charcoal against a dark canvas. The light of the moon outside wouldn't have been strong enough to pick out more than the window without it but with it, he could make out the lines and shapes of the room. There were courses of study on the night vision runes and special training that one was meant to go through before using them in battle. It was like learning to fight shadows and without colour, the world was harder to analyze. Depth was harder to judge so it was harder to aim, to keep your balance, to keep your peripheral vision in check.  Will hadn't taken the courses. He'd learned the rune from a book and practiced himself on long dark nights when he couldn't sleep.

Tessa was barely recognizable with the help of the fading rune. A collection of shapes that he could only register as a face if he could keep all his attention on them. He did. He let himself stare at her in the ways that he would never allow himself to when she was able to see him. He stared at the uneven shapes and shadows of her and imagined that he could see her face.

"What happened?" she asked.

"I certainly did not fall asleep," Will said.

She ignored the attempt at humour in his voice and said, "Did you have a nightmare?"

He made a noise in response. It didn't really mean anything but Tessa took it as a yes. She reached out to him and found his shoulder first. He'd forgotten that she couldn't see him at all. Her hand moved tentatively up his shoulder to his neck, barely touching until she found his cheek and cupped it in her palm. It was dark and the world still didn't feel quite real and he leaned into the touch like a cat.

Jem was curled between them, his back was pressed up against Will's leg and he could feel the rise and fall of each breath. Will settled a hand on Jem's shoulder, hoping that touching his parabatai would be enough to pull him back down into reality. Jem had always been the one to keep him sane and balanced in every other thing.

It should have worked with Tessa. It should have worked better with Tessa than it did with other things.

But it didn't.

Nothing made it easier when it came to Tessa.

She caught his other cheek with her free hand and it turned his face towards her, he had been trying not to look at her, to stare at her when she couldn’t see him in return. He gave that up. He forced the power of the fading rune to give him as much as he could grasp. The edges of her face, the line of her brow and the fall of her hair. She was concerned and he couldn’t tell if he was seeing her expression or imagining it.

Tessa pulled him in and the world still felt like a dream. Maybe it was a dream. Will closed his eyes. He still had his hand on Jem as he settled his forehead against her shoulder. He could feel them both breathing and it took a few moments for him to find a rhythm that matched. Slow and even and gentle. For just a moment, Will let the feeling of there with both of them wash over him.

“Do you think he’ll ever wake up again?” Tessa asked. Her voice was near his ear.

“Yes,” Will said.

The question shattered the strange peace of the darkness and the quiet so deep he could hear their heartbeats. His shoulders knotted but he didn’t move. He could not, would not, accept that he had had his last conversation with Jem Carstairs. He would never accept that. Jem could be dead fifteen years and Will would still be expecting to find him sitting on that chair by the fire in the drawing room with a considering look on his face.

“I had an idea, but I think we need to ask him,” Tessa said.

Will had cuddled into her touch without meaning to. He leaned forward and she’d let him settle closer so that his head touched her shoulder. She continued to hold him and she rested her cheek against his hair. It was all a dream. A terrible dream where Jem never woke again, a wonderful dream where Tessa spoke into his ear and held him close. Just a terrible dream. If Jem’s life was the price of being allowed to lean in against her like this then he didn’t want it. It wasn’t worth the cost. Nothing was worth that cost.

“What kind of idea?” his voice sounded far away to his own ears. His voice, his failings didn’t belong in this dream. He couldn’t save Jem. He wouldn’t be able to protect Tessa. He didn’t know what to do.

“I want to make a deal with the faeries,” Tessa said.

“That is a terrible idea.”

“It’s the only option we have.”

“And what are you suggesting, that we sacrifice Jem to them?”

That wasn’t what she meant, of course it wasn’t, but the anger escaped before he’d realized what the feeling was. He pulled the anger back in. He reeled in the old cursed Will’s urge to lash out like it was a piece of fishing line. Will pulled away from her. She didn’t drop her hands but she didn’t try to hold him in place either. He reached up and gathered up both her hands in his and pulled them down from his face. Before he could apologize, she was talking again.

“Dark silver,” she said.

“We still don’t know what the hell that means, maybe it was a bad translation. That miner you transform into is about as far from a scholar of the fae courts as a person can get,” the anger had gotten away from him again. He bit his tongue and squeezed her hands in his. A silent apology.

“Those are simple words,” Tessa said.

“I know, I did not… I apologize,” he said.

“The little ball they pulled from Olaf’s blood and the stuff they pulled out of Jem this afternoon, aren’t the same,” Tessa said.

“How long have you been thinking about this?” he said.

“Since you chased them off,” she said.

She readjusted their hands so that she was holding onto him as tightly as he was holding onto her. He couldn’t see her but he could imagine her expression. Tense and earnest. Jem slept on between them.

Tessa continued, “The blood iron that they took from me, from Olaf, was dull and darker coloured than the stuff they were so excited about getting from Jem. The little ball of it from Jem shimmered and it was brighter. It wasn’t the same. If they can take it out, we should let them have it. They can take it all. It’s not from his blood, not naturally and if it isn’t from his blood then the only thing it could be is yin fen. If they want the yin fen, I say we give it to them.”

“It might not work.”

“But if that’s what they’re pulling out, if they’re pulling the silver from his blood and not the iron…”

Will’s anger surfaced again and he said, “It might kill him faster. They might just take everything. They’re not exactly trustworthy.”

Tessa’s hands tightened on his and he opened his eyes to see if she was angry with him for that comment or not. The last of the night vision rune had faded. He couldn’t see her at all anymore.

She took in a deep breath but when she spoke it wasn’t with anger.

Soft and even. Her voice carefully controlled.

“Dead is dead,” she said.

The words hit him like a blow but now that the words were coming, she spoke soft and fast and with an intensity that held him still and silent. “If there are two paths and one is certain death and the other has just the faintest glimmer of hope, then isn’t the glimmer of hope worth a risk? If you could have nothing or a sliver of possibility, you take the sliver.”

“He hates attempts at mythical cures. He thinks that it’s all a waste of time,” Will said.

“He’s out of time to waste, there’s nothing to lose,” Tessa said.

Will sat in silence. His mind was turning it over. His hands were warm from being tangled up in hers and he didn’t want to let go. Her voice was low and angry and desperate. It was the little voice in his own head that had always been whispering that he couldn’t save Jem, he could never save Jem, and now he would have to watch him die.

Will tried to push it aside and grab hold of Tessa’s calculated optimism. He had rolled the ball of shiny stuff around in his hand too. Jem’s blood was contaminated. Between the demon’s poison and the drug, it had been contaminated since he was eleven years old. That was all it took to explain the difference. It wasn’t some magical cure. It was just contamination. It could be nothing.

She saw a glimmer but it could be just another empty hope.

Or maybe, Tessa was right.

“A glimmer of hope,” Will said.

“Is better than nothing,” she said.

Will nodded. He leaned into her so their foreheads touched and he nodded again so she would be able to feel it.

“I’m going back into the woods,” she said.

“I’m coming,” he said.

“You scare them,” she said.

“Then let them be scared, they tried to kill you once already.”

She nodded and he felt it.

“Go get your boots, we’re going now,” she said.


	22. Into the Woods

Tessa took a deep breath of night air. The forest in front of them was skeletal and the shadows of the branches stretched out across the snow towards them. Grasping fingers of blue black against the paler blue of the snow lit by the moonlight. The world was quiet and cold and malevolent.

Tessa did not want to go into those woods.

The memory of unnerving lightness lingered. She doubted she would ever forget the sensation of having her blood pulled from her body by magic. She didn’t want to leave the cabin or Jem. If she had the power, she would have frozen the moment in time until they could have come up with a better plan. She didn’t have that power. This was all she could think to do.

“A mad plan is better than no plan at all,” she said into the silence.

She and Will hadn’t said a word as they’d dressed and stepped out into the snow. She said it to herself as much as she said it to him. She needed to convince herself that it was true.

“Let’s hope so,” Will said.

His face was blank and empty. Serious. Angry. To be an avenging angel was his birthright and tonight he looked it. Under that, under the warrior’s expression was anger. Anger and sorrow as though he was already grieving. She reached out and squeezed his hand through their heavy mittens. He squeezed back.

He didn’t think there was a hope in hell of this working. She knew that. He didn’t share her hope but he had come with her nonetheless and for that she was deeply grateful. Having someone at her shoulder as she approached the woods again helped keep her calm. If Will was here, they had a chance of succeeding. She was simply glad that she didn’t have to do it alone.

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” she said with an edge of optimism that she was too scared to truly feel.  

“Into the breach then,” he said.

Without a witchstone, they had to make their way by moonlight. Tessa didn’t let go of Will as they walked. The path into the woods was battered by the path of their feet and they didn’t sink in as far as they had on the first trip across the fresh snow. Tessa slipped around a little in her over-sized boots but she didn’t want to change into Olaf too early. The sense memory of wearing that body would make her nerves worse not better.

The woods were quiet.

The animal life was sparse to begin with driven away or drained of blood by the fairies and what was left was hiding away. Even the wind was still. Tessa listened for any sound of life but her ears weren’t as sharp as Will’s and he tensed before she had heard anything. His hand tightened on hers and he pulled her a little closer to him.

Tessa was immensely grateful when Will stopped shy of the trees themselves. There was nothing to be gained from being surrounded again. It was unnerving enough to be here where the shadows were so thick. The moonlight was bright and sharper than Tessa had ever imagined that it could be. It was eerie for the moon to cast shadows like this.

Will called out something in a language that she didn’t speak. His voice was no louder than he might use at dinner but it echoed into the silence. His voice was the only sound aside from her heart beat. She flinched and immediately hated herself for it. This was her plan and she would not cower behind Will. She drew herself up to her full height and changed.

She didn’t step away from Will but she promised herself that she would not flinch again.

She stood in the body that had almost died in these woods and did not cower. She might not know exactly what she was but she knew that she was strong enough to do this. This was her idea. This was the only chance that Jem had. It was so slim as to be non-existent but it was still a chance and she wouldn’t be the weak link that made the fairies doubt them.

The silence stretched around them. Will’s voice didn’t echo, it was swallowed by the snow and the trees and the preternatural silence of the place.

They waited.

It was a long time before the chattering descended on them. It built slowly. A rustle of leaves and branches that slowly resolved into a rush of chittering like insects or birds and finally individual voices. It took another few moments for Tessa to pick out words in the swarm. Her own ears and eyes weren’t as strong as Will’s but they were still far stronger than the mundane’s whose body she wore now. She could not see them.

Will called out again. A demand.

This time a single voice rose out of the chittering and answered him. It answered in one word, “Murderer.”

Tessa translated.

“You started it,” Will retorted in English before rephrasing his answer in the language of the faerie courts.

“We do not negotiate. We are the kings and queens of our wood,” this time the answer came from another part of the horde. Tessa still couldn’t see them but she knew that they were surrounding them. They were hiding in the drifts of snow behind them. They were making the branches of the nearest trees rustle. They were everywhere and they were angry.

Will answered them.

They buzzed in anger but it wasn’t anything Tessa could make sense of. It was possible it wasn’t a human tongue at all.  

“What did you say to them?” Tessa asked.

“That I could kill most of them before they managed to kill me,” he said.

“Will,” her voice was a warning

He shrugged and took a deep breath and squared up his shoulders. It was almost exactly the same movement she had made before she had transformed. He spoke again and his voice was even and careful again. He sounded older, not an angry little boy’s voice but a general or a king: calm and dangerous.

She didn’t know what he said but it made the angry chatter recede for a few moments before surging back.

“Give us the dying and we will allow the others passage through our storm,” they said.

“Your storm,” Tessa repeated.

“The storms bend to our will, we are kings and queens of the forest.”

She translated for Will.

“They’re little bastards of the forest,” he said.

“We’re not taking that deal,” she said ignoring the commentary.

“I know,” he said.

He said something else then paused and turned to Tessa, “What did they call it? Tum something. I can’t say it right,” he said. She gave him the phrase. Tumma hopea. Dark silver. He turned back to the forest and finished what he was saying.

“Blood,” came the answer.

“No,” Tessa didn’t translate for Will.

“Blood and iron and silver,” the voices in the forest said, in chorus this time.

“You can have the silver, but nothing else,” she said. Olaf’s voice sounded wrong in the dark. She had expected to hear her own. The body felt wrong. She shouldn’t be having this conversation while wearing someone else’s face. She was scared and angry and this was too deeply personal to be left to someone else’s voice and someone else’s body. Will put his hand on her arm and she almost changed back into herself just so she could take some comfort in the touch.

“Tess,” Will said.

She explained it.

“I’m going to threaten them again.”

“You’re the one who keeps saying that negotiating with fairies is dangerous,” she said.

“It is and we’re failing at it,” he said.

“When in doubt threaten a massacre?” she said.

“They’re planning to kill us in our sleep. It’s not a massacre if it is in self defense,” Will said.

Tessa sighed but she wasn’t sure what the better course of action would be. Will started to speak. His voice was soft and angry and carried in the dark. She watched him without turning away from the trees. He is expression was as even as his voice. In a little slip, she could see the person he would be when he was fifty. Calm and powerful. Gray at his temples and this same even expression on his face. The moment passed and he was just Will again.

“The deal is not good,” the faeries said.

Tessa translated.

Will said, “The deal is the best that you’re going to get,” before repeating it in the Celtic of the courts.

“We want blood.”

“I want a pile of gold, a personal library, enough gin to drown an elephant, and a very pretty hat but we don’t always get what we want,” Will said.

“It’s a good thing they don’t understand English,” Tessa muttered.

The fairies were talking amongst themselves. They had a language of their own that she couldn’t understand. She strained for words that made sense nonetheless. The voices blended together into a chorus like the sound of spring crickets that built to the drone of cicadas and then retreated again. Each time the pitch rose and the voices sounded angrier, her nerves wound a little tighter and didn’t ease.

Will repeated the offer that they take as much of the silver from Jem that they could but leave everything else. Another rush of argument. Will calmly repeated the offer and the threat. It was not much of a negotiation but neither side had much to bargain with.

There were two possibilities and Tessa was finally having to face the second option. If the Faeries wouldn’t take the deal for the silver, they were going to have to try and fight their way out tonight. If the faeries tried to kill them here in the snow, she wasn’t sure they could survive it. Even if they did, the faeries controlled the storm and had then trapped. Will sounded calm and confident but they were the ones at a disadvantage.

Even if Jem died, she and Will would still be trapped by the swarm of blue bodies and swirling snow. They might kill a few or even a lot of faeries before they died but numbers and weather were against them. The fight would happen in a blizzard. They were all going to die.

It wasn’t just a question of Jem’s survival. It was a question of all their lives. If a miracle happened and Jem recovered, they could still die in snow.

“It’s the silver or it’s nothing,” Will said, annoyance crept into his voice each time he switched to English but it would be gone when he spoke again to the faeries.    

“Three days,” the voices finally said.

Tessa translated and Will asked, “What does that mean?”

There was a pause and then the fairies kept talking, “Three days passage through the storm. We will take the silver but we will give you only three days of safety in return for such a paltry gift.”

“Two weeks,” Will countered once Tessa had translated.

“That’s a long time,” she said.

“Assuming it works, Jem’s going to need recovery time before we can move him fast enough to make it past the horizon. That storm blew in off the flat land to the east. Assuming the land is that flat and it’s not a trick of the light, we’re going to need all three days to get clear of the storm’s territory,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“No. I don’t know anything about prairies and storms and traveling distances across land. The farthest I’ve ever traveled was the time I came to London and that was in summer along well traveled roads. I’m hoping that two weeks will give us the time to figure it out,” Will said.

Will called out the offer.

“Three days,” the fairies repeated.

“Three weeks will work,” Will said.

The negotiations were uneven but Will didn’t budge and the fairies finally caved. They were not the faeries of the high courts. They were isolated and used to attacking things that couldn’t see them coming at all. The faeries should have held all the cards but they folded their hand and walked away.

The voices retreated, the rustling retreated. When a voice accepted the terms of the deal it was a lone voice and it spoke directly to Will in the High Celtic. Rather than a chorus speaking through the local language. Then with a last shiver of branches, they were left alone in the snow. Tessa turned to Will and he stared back.

“It worked,” she said.

“We convinced them to try,” Will corrected. “It may not be the win we want it to be.”

Tessa ignored that. She could only hold one disaster in her thoughts at a time. A moment before she had been sure that she was going to have to fight for her life with nothing but single runed dagger and whatever ingenuity she could scrounge up. She had been calculating their chances of survival. Now Will was already thinking about the next thing and she was left reeling.

“Why did they agree?” she asked.

“I think they genuinely don’t want any more of their people to die. The threats and the bluster were just that. Empty threats. Posturing to make themselves feel more important. We’re the first people they’ve ever faced that needed to be fought. We scare them. They’re not soldiers. They’re miners.”

“They murder people.”

“They’re faeries, they harvest blood iron from humans. Humans aren’t people to them. That’s why the Accords exist. The faeries don’t think any more of eating humans alive than you would of having mutton stew. We don’t matter to them. Without the Accords, the free fae are some of the most dangerous creatures to human life because their morals don’t extend to mortals, especially mundanes.”

“They’re monsters,” Tessa said. “Don’t make excuses for them.”

“Oh yes, they are monsters. These ones live so far away from everything else that they probably aren’t even aware of the accords. They used up their little flock of human cattle and what wandered into their fields next was dangerous enough to start killing their citizens. They want us gone without any more loss of life,” Will said.

“When,” she stressed the word, “We get out of here, we should send the entire Clave out here.”

“When,” he put the same stress on the word and she wasn’t sure if he was mocking her or not, “We get back to London, we’ll do just that.”

They had been walking back towards the cabin as they spoke. They lapsed into silence and the only sound was the crunch of boots on snow as they walked. Will reached the porch of the cabin before she did and his boots rang out on the wood. He reached back and helped her make the last steps to the door.

“Is there a chance this will work?” she asked.

“Yes. There’s a chance.”

“How small is it?”

“As someone said to me recently, a sliver is better than nothing.”

She smiled at him, tired and not quite happy and he met it with a smile just as exhausted. Together they pushed inside.


	23. Silver and Blood

Tessa jerked to a stop in the door way and stepped back into his chest. Will’s arms came up to catch her but she wasn’t falling. Shock had made her stumble and it took Will a moment to realize why. He held her against his chest as he looked around the room. Tessa was breathing too hard and she shuddered with anger or disgust. She had seemed fine in the woods but the image laid out before them was hitting her harder than the faeries in the trees ever could. Will caught her by the arm before she could rush into the room.

“We asked for this,” he said.

The little blue vultures had beat them back to the cabin though Will hadn’t seen them go by.  

He closed the door behind them without letting go of her. She made a little sound of protest but didn’t pull away. The jacket she was wearing hung off her shoulders and hung almost to her knees making her look small and too young. Will didn’t let her walk into the room. He didn’t trust the faeries not to attack her if she got too close.

They were swarming over Jem in the bed.

Little bodies moving over one another in a chaotic dance. Will could barely see Jem through them all. The blue of the faerie’s skin wasn’t a natural color. Icy blue but too bright, too harsh for anything found in nature. The chattering of their voices filled the room like it was something tangible. Not a sound but something with weight.

They lit their own work with little floating balls of light that wove in and out through the bodies with as little rhyme or reason as the rest of the swarm. The light in the room danced. Shadows on the wall shifted. The fragments of shadow rose and fell. The mundane relics of the people who had lived in the cabin were lit in poison green and obscured by shadows of thin bodies and long limbs.

It was a horrifying spectacle and they hadn’t been there long.

The worst hadn’t started yet.

If Tessa hadn’t been on the brink of panic beside him, he might have lost it himself but holding her together was enough of a distraction to keep him level. Will pulled her gloves and hat off as though she was a child and kept her close to him as he did it. She leaned in against him and he held onto her as much to keep himself calm as to keep her from panicking.

Neither of them took their eyes off of Jem.

The first haze of blood in the air was so faint that Will almost couldn’t make it out in the dark of the cabin. But then it got thicker. The green light of the faerie’s lanterns made the droplets shimmer like dew. Beside him, Tessa made a sound of protest.

“It’s started,” Will said. They couldn’t stop it now. The first attack had left Jem so drained that he had barely been breathing. There was no turning back from this. Whether it worked or it didn’t, this was the decision they had made. There was no stepping back from it now.

“I know,” she said.

They fell silent again.

The blood got thicker. Too thick. Will forced every reaction down. He had years of practice at burying his most personal reactions and he put it all to use in keeping his expression level. He inched a step closer, he needed to see that Jem was still breathing. The horde of faeries drew back from him like a receding wave and everything in the room shivered.

“You scare them, stay back, let them finish,” Tessa said.

Will flattened his hand against the spot on his chest where the parabatai rune still lay. It hadn’t changed. Jem was still alive somewhere in the mess of squirming bodies and bloody rain. If he wasn’t, Will would know. Will pushed at the bond as though it were possible to send energy and strength down it. Maybe it was possible. Jem had been his strength since they had met.

“He’s-” Tessa started. She turned to look up at Will and the way he was holding his chest. The shadows danced across the stricken expression on her face.  

“He’s alive. He’s stronger enough for this,” Will said through gritted teeth.

Tessa wrapped her arms around his waist and held onto him. Her eyes were back on Jem. Resolve in every line of her expression. This had been her plan and she was standing by it. The line between who was comforting who was blurring again. Will picked up her hand and held it against his chest. She wasn’t a part of the bond. She couldn’t offer Jem her strength through it but she was Will’s strength.

On the blankets, the silver pooled.

It reflected the red and the green but Will knew what it was and its true colour. No matter how closely he watched, he couldn’t see what the faeries were doing. How were they pulling the blood out of his body? How were they separating the silver from it? He wanted to know. If he understood it then maybe he’d be able to predict whether or not Jem could survive it.

The rune was still there. The bond was still there. He had survived it this far.

They rolled the pools up into reflective balls. A growing collection of marbles that glowed green in the light like stolen cat’s eyes. The faeries would break off from the main swarm in little groups to come and bounce beside the pile at the foot of the bed as though celebrating their haul. Another ball would be pushed off the bed and it would remind them off their task and they’d clamber back the bed frame to go back to work.

It might have been fascinating if Jem’s life wasn’t hanging in the balance.

Will fought for glimpse of him in the swarm. Jem was in there somewhere, beneath it all. It wasn’t a strange faerie revel to be investigated and considered and discussed with a tutor later. It was Jem’s life. That pile of silver had been making Jem’s joints burn and his lungs shudder and bleed. It wasn’t just a pile of shimmery marbles. It was certain death all rolled up and stacked like children’s toys.

Will’s chest tightened.

No.

His body screamed out the word before his thoughts caught up.

No.

Tessa hugged him a little tighter as she had the last time he’d panicked but he was already starting to move.

This wasn’t the same.

No.

A moment later Jem’s foot twitched.

No.

The reaction went deep. This wasn’t just concern. This was instinct or some magic in the parabatai bond.  This was more than just worry. His whole being was vibrating with the word. Will didn’t give himself time to over think the feeling.

No.

He waded into the swarm of faeries. Some of them scattered before he got to the bed but he was pushing through others who screeched and scrambled away from him. The faeries ran. Will didn’t need to so much as pull the seraph blade out. They were gone from the bed seconds after he had touched it.

The blood in the air wasn’t as thick as it had been but it was thick enough that he could feel it on his face. It speckled Jem’s face and shirt as well. Jem was still and quiet on the bed. That single tensed muscle had been the only movement he had made through the entire horrifying process. Ashen and pale in the retreating green light. The room got dark again as the faeries disappeared through the cracks in the walls and the ceiling and left them alone without their lamps.

Will touch Jem’s cheek

He wasn’t breathing.  

“James,” Will’s voice came out soft and pleading. “Jem.”

His heart beat still fluttered weakly when Will touched the pulse point at his neck but he wasn’t breathing. Will fumbled for the stele. Strength. Healing. He pulled Jem’s shirt open and his hand shook a little as he drew the runes but he poured himself into them. A Shadowhunter had to train to draw and receive runes, to pull power from the Angel took immense focus and skill. Will had never been great at it. Runes were not his strong suit but he put every bit of himself into drawing these ones.

Tessa hovered at his shoulder.

She was not touching either of them.

She was asking questions.

Will couldn’t think straight enough to begin to imagine what to say to her. Jem wasn’t breathing yet. Will gathered him up and held onto him. Jem felt thin and brittle and the fever was gone. The blood that had fallen onto his face was cool where Will pressed his cheek against Jem’s forehead. He held on because maybe being closer would make it easier for Jem to draw strength from the parabatai bond. That wasn’t how it worked. Will knew that but he didn’t care. He needed to do something. He needed to hod onto Jem as long as he could.

He still had a heartbeat.

He still had a heartbeat.

Will closed his eyes and held on and prayed that he had enough strength left for the runes to be worth something.

Jem made a sound. Barely an inhalation.

Then he did it again.

Will let out his own breath in a rush and rocked Jem in his arms.

“You’re crying,” Tessa said beside him. Her hand brushed his shoulder and he blinked back the tears that had gathered in the corners of his eyes.  He hadn’t realized they were there. She had been talking to him and - for the first time in what felt like hours but couldn’t have been more than a minute – Will turned to look at her. Tessa rested a hand on Jem’s forehead and looked at Will in the dim moonlight that filtered in through the windows.

“It has been an upsetting day,” Will said.

“He’s breathing,” Tessa said. “He’s still breathing.”

“He’s stronger than the rest of us, he always has been,” Will said.

“I know.”

Tessa sat down beside him and leaned her shoulder against Will’s. She stroked Jem’s cheek. They sat in the dark, on a bed dripping with blood and pools of yin fen, and listened to Jem fight for every shallow breath of air. They didn’t move. Even as the blood dried and the dawn started to creep across the snow outside.


	24. Breathing

Tessa stopped and stood in the cold. She was filling a bucket with snow but she stopped to stare out at landscape and catch her breath. Dawn had only just broken and the sun still hung low in the sky. A shiver went through her that had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with horror and panic and too little sleep.

She shook it off and turned her back on the forest. Work would help. Work always helped. She took a last deep breath of winter air and then climbed the porch steps. She needed something to do to keep her hands busy or she was going to lose her mind. The sheets needed washed, everyone was bloody, they needed to eat.

These were things she could handle.

She couldn’t handle the way that Will was watching Jem and absently rubbing at the parabatai rune. She couldn’t handle the sound of Jem’s breathing. The rasp of air in and out of his lungs sounded painful and it was too little and too slow and there was nothing to be done. There was nothing she could do now. Now all that they could do was wait to see if he would recover.

So, Tessa was going to wash the bloody sheets and force Will to wash his face and then she was going to cook something terrible and bland from the minimal food they had left. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t going to change any of the things she couldn’t handle but it was all she had so it was what she would do.

“A bucket of snow?” Will asked when she hauled it back inside. She put it on the stove and shoved another piece of wood onto the fire inside.

“I need water.”

Will hummed in response.

Tessa ignored him. She didn’t know what that noise meant and so she would ignore it until he decided to use words. Will looked away from her without saying anything and she frowned at the side of his head. She left her bucket of snow to melt and came over to look at Jem.

Will sat beside him on the bed. Both were blood streaked and it turned Tessa’s stomach to know that all that blood was Jem’s and losing it was just going to make him weaker. Will was quiet and still and watchful. He hadn’t been beyond of arm’s reach of Jem since he’d chased the faeries off.

Tessa touched Jem’s hair and pushed it back from his face. It was nearly black but it was shot through with silver where the faeries hadn’t been able to finish stripping the yin fen away. The gray strands were mixed in with his darker hair as though he was going prematurely gray. On an older man it might have been called salt and pepper. He looked different. His skin wasn’t as paper white as it had been. It was ashen and pale but with so much yin fen gone, his natural skin tone was showing through.

Different.

Different but still Jem. His cheekbones were the same. The shape of his jaw. The way his bottom lip was fuller than the top. The colours were a little different but the details were the same. She was still her Jem. Will’s Jem. Their Jem. She looked away from him at Will who was quietly observing it all.

“Do you have any idea?” she asked.

“He should be dead,” Will said.

Tessa snapped at him, “Just say no. If you don’t know, just say so.”

“Tess,” Will said.

She hadn’t meant to be so angry. She looked up at him. Her lips were pressed together and her hands were curled into fists. She forced them to relax. She didn’t smile but she forced herself to drop the fists and take a breath. Will didn’t look offended. His eyes were steady and his eyes stayed trained on her. She didn’t look away from him.

“He’s got two problems,” Will said. Tessa’s hands curled back up again and Will grabbed one and held it between his. The fist cradled in his hands tight enough that she couldn’t unroll it even if she wanted to. “You’re always calmer once you understand. Let me explain as much as I know. Maybe you can see something in it that I can’t. Do you want me to tell you?”

She nodded and unclenched her fist and he relaxed his grip so that she could hold onto his hand as he talked. She pulled in air. It smelled like wood smoke from the stove. It smelled like blood and magic. It wasn’t calming her down but she kept breathing. Her anger coiled around and around in her stomach and her chest. She wasn’t angry at Will. She was angry at the faeries and Mortmain and fate and that demon in China all those years ago and herself. She was so angry at herself.

This was her fault. She had pushed for this. She had made it worse.

“There’s the yin fen, yes but there’s also the poison that he was taking it for. Breaking a yin fen addiction is hard but possible. Jem could have done it himself if the poison wasn’t waiting to drive him mad and kill him as soon as the drug was out of body,” Will said. Tessa knew this. He had only ever explained it the one time but she remembered it. She let Will talk because his voice was helping her reel back in her temper.

“The poison was in his blood, the yin fen slowed it down and kept it from eating away his body. If the faeries took the poison along with the silver, and they might have if the two were mixed, then he’ll recover. If they didn’t, he’s still dying and all we’ve done is changed the nature of that death,” Will said.

“How do we know?”

“We wait to see if he recovers.”

Tessa did not swear. She wanted to but somehow swearing over Jem while he was laid out like this was inviting bad luck. She touched his hair again. He looked different. That should have been a good sign. But he wasn’t moving. He was struggling to breathe. His skin was clammy which might have been an improvement over feverish but Tessa didn’t know enough about medicine to know for sure.

“I’m going to clean things up a little bit,” she said.

“You’re still upset.”

“I’m going to be upset until he opens his eyes, Mr. Herondale and don’t go pretending like you’re not just as upset as I am,” she said in an imitation of Charlotte’s no nonsense voice that she couldn’t quite pull off smoothly. She made Will smile though. A brief ghost of a smile but it was a smile and that helped them both. She stroked Jem’s cheek again and then turned back to her melted snow.

She washed Jem’s face and hair and scrubbed the blood droplets from the collapsed magic off his hands. She bullied Will into washing his face and then helping her move Jem so she could wash the sheets and then rigging up a clothing line inside to hang them to dry. She washed her own face and hands and dreamed briefly of a bathtub big enough to soak in.

When it was all done, she sat down on the edge of the bare mattress beside Will and tried to keep despair from closing back in. Will took her hand again and spread it out on Jem’s chest so that her palm was pressed over his heart and Will’s hand held it in place. She looked up at Will who gave her that ghost of a smile and waited.

Will raised his eyebrows just a fraction.

A question. She understood it.

“It might be,” she said in answer to the silent question: Is his heartbeat any stronger?

“I think it is,” he said.

Tessa smiled and pushed her way up onto bed with them. She got herself comfortable beside Jem and then reached for Will’s hand again. He put it back in the same place so they could both feel the gentle rhythm of Jem’s heart as he lay still and calm between them. Maybe the rhythm was stronger. His chest rose and fell with each breath. Maybe that was deeper too. Maybe she was just an optimist. Her thoughts stuttered along from maybe to maybe until she drifted off to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we begin my favourite run of scenes. They were the scenes that made me love this story and kept me writing it over the last two years.


	25. Watch Your Footing

Tessa was curled up in the bed beside Jem with her head against his shoulder. Her hair had been hastily pulled back from her face but it was a mess. Her eyes were shut and she was as still as Jem was but she was too tense to be asleep. Her shoulders were drawn up, her fingers were curled into a fist and she was breathing in a tight quick rhythm that made Will more anxious just listening to it. Her worry fed his worry in a never-ending loop.

He had stepped out to get more wood and to take a moment to breathe fresh air. Tessa’s rush of cleaning suddenly made sense. The need to do something overtook him once he was moving and there was nothing to do. Nothing at all. Nothing but wait and watch and hope. The entire world hung in the balance. Jem’s life hung in the balance. Maybe the two things were the same. They were teetering.

"How is he?" Will asked.

"His breathing isn't any better but his heart is still beating," Tessa said in a whisper.

Jem hadn't moved yet and it was taking a toll on Tessa. It was taking a toll on Will as well but he was trying to hide it so he didn’t worry her. She would worry about him. She would worry about a foot stool with a little bit of prodding and Will didn’t want to give her any reason for it with him.

"He's going to recover," Will said.

"You know that or you're just being an optimist?"

"You know me, I'm not prone to optimism."

"You sought to break what you believed to be an unbreakable curse, you became parabatai to a dying man, you risked all our lives on a deal with faeries. Those are not the choices of someone who is not capable of optimism."

Will laughed. It was dry and startled. He had not considered himself an optimist. Not since the morning he'd woken to find his sister dead and his entire family under threat from his very presence. It wasn't a situation that bred optimistic thoughts but maybe there was some truth in what she said. He wanted there to be some truth in what she said.

"The faeries were your idea. It should be mentioned that I went to Magnus in desperation, not in hope," he said. "I have faith not in the goodness of the world or myself but in people better than me. In you and Magnus and Jem. Always Jem. It is not blind optimism or empty hope to know that he will recover. He did not die last night and if there is a chance he will survive, any chance, no matter how small, he will find a way to do it."

Tessa nodded. She didn't raise her head or look at him but her expression was even and serious. She reached out a hand and placed her palm on Jem's chest. Will pushed a lock of her hair back from her face and she finally glanced at him. He smiled and hoped that it was reassuring. She returned it but it was just the echo of an expression. Politeness. Nothing more.

"When I first came to London," Will said, gathering up another strand of her hair and pulling it back from her face, "I was lonely. Not the usual loneliness of a new arrival in a city but a bone deep kind of isolation. I was a miserable brat of a child but I'm sure that comes as no surprise to you."

The echo of a smile spread a little farther and Will let his tentative fingers start to smooth out and unwind her hair. They didn't talk about it but they'd gotten very good over the last few days. They woke up tangled together and didn't mention it. He reached for her hand and she squeezed his fingers and they didn't mention it. She rested her head on his shoulder and they didn’t mention it. He picked apart tangled strands of her hair and smoothed them down over the pillow and they wouldn't mention this either.

"I remember the first time I truly smiled after arriving in London. It was almost a year after I'd come to the city. I had smiled before that but they were sharpened smiles, not anything that approximated joy. Jem could tell, perhaps Charlotte could too but I knew it with Jem, I knew he saw through those smiles," he said.

Will slipped his fingers into her hair and ran them down from where the hair was warm from her body to the little ringlets at the ends. He told himself he was checking for snarls he had missed but he kept going long after it was smooth because he liked the feel of it in his fingers. She tilted her head just a little into the touch and he didn’t stop.

"Jem smiled like breathing. As he still does. As he always will. He smiled through his bad days and his good. He won people over just as effortlessly. I think I might have resented him if he hadn't chosen me. I still don't know why he did. I did everything in my power to dissuade people from the ridiculous impulse they sometimes had to befriend me but he didn’t even seem to notice when I tried them on him and truly, I didn’t want to succeed."

"Jem sees the truth in people. He saw that truth in you no matter how you tried to hide it," Tessa said in a soft voice.

"Perhaps but sometimes I think he created the truth he wanted. He forced me to be a better person simply by refusing to believe that I wasn't."

"Then maybe we all owe him our gratitude," she said.

"I know I do," Will said, "but I was telling a story about smiling. We were on a beginner’s demon hunt. We had been out with a senior Shadowhunter, someone I suspect Charlotte was trying to teach humility to, and we weren't going to find anything. We were thirteen and being tested on our ability to observe our surroundings and respond to clues. The nest was empty and so our task was simply to find it."

"Did you?" Tessa asked.

"Don't rush my story," Will said clucking his tongue at her like a governess who had been interrupted. "Our instructor for the evening had taken an immediate dislike to Jem and his silvering hair - by then the rumours of addiction were rampant in the London Conclave - Jem did nothing to earn the bastard’s ire but I made sure that he learned to despise me. I took particular exception to his treatment of Jem and made sure that he knew it. About two hours in, we were bored and had realized that it wasn't a true hunt but a glorified training exercise set in putrid tunnels. All evening long we were serenaded by little sarcastic remarks from our guide. It was grating. ‘Watch your footing,’ that kind of thing. I remember it all as inane advice, the sort no one over five needs to be told.

"The man sent us off to scout out the land ahead and Jem found a pool of water. It was only about four feet deep. One of the things he kept telling us was to watch our footing and beware unstable ground and I suppose this was why. Jem went ahead of me and picked his way along the edges of the hole. Careful and slow. I don't think he even got his boots splashed."

"Did you fall in?" Tessa asked.

"No but I appreciate your vote of confidence in my ability," Will said.

She chuckled and shifted so he could gather up all her hair. He'd done about as well as he could smoothing without a brush but he wasn't going to risk this strange fragile moment by getting up to find one.

"Farther along the tunnel, we found gouges in the walls. Jem called out to - oh - Mr. Swansea, that was his name - just like he'd told us to. I'd almost forgotten the water until we heard the splash."

"Oh no," Tessa said.

"Oh yes, he fell face first into it. By the time he made it to where we were he was sodden and surly. He stormed on ahead of us and then stopped and spun back to wag a finger like a little old lady. He says, 'How'd you get around that sinkhole?' And Jem, calm and polite and so very earnest, says 'We watched our footing.'"

"He didn't really say that," Tessa said.

"He truly did, not a word of a lie, it was the only petty thing I've ever seen Jem do and I can't even prove that it was intentional. At the time though, Swansea's expression was to die for. I was laughing at him."

Tessa interrupted, "I don't think laughing at someone's misfortune counts as a joyful smile."

"I know, shush and let me speak," Will said, "but then a few days later, during a training session, Jem said to me in that same calm voice, 'Watch your footing, William,' and I grinned at him and took a pratfall and when the tutor turned around, we were leaned together on the floor laughing at each other. It was a joke that was just ours and we traded it back and forth in the most inappropriate times. Somehow those three words had become proof that I wasn't entirely alone in London."

"You aren't entirely alone, Will, you won't be," Tessa said.

"I know," he said.

The conversation wove on as Will played with her hair. He believed her and the unspoken promise that she would not abandon him no matter what happened. And yet, no matter what happened, this would never be their normal. To know that he had Tessa as a friend at his side was better than to not have her at all. He pushed the other thoughts down as he pet her hair and listened to her whisper some story about New York and her brother. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the first chapters I wrote for this story.  
> I wrote the first draft of this chapter on a bus on my phone on my way to work in 2016.


	26. Pieces

Jem wasn't quite awake but he was aware of himself and where he was and was conscious enough to catalogue the sensations. His joints burned but he was so cold that his fingers were trembling. Usually the addiction was a quiet constant companion but at just that moment it was screaming through his mind. He wanted that damned silver powder the way a drowning man wanted air. If he could have moved, if his body wasn't so weak, he wasn't sure what he would have done. Wander off into the snow to look for some. Scream and yell and argue. Thankfully, he was too weak to embarrass himself like that. He lay still and shook.

"It's just a nightmare, it'll pass," a voice said.

She was close. He had been too distracted by the pain and the chaos in his mind to realize where he was. He lay with his head tucked in against her neck and her cheek rested against his hair. He shivered again and she adjusted the heavy blankets over them but the cold was too deep inside him. She kept talking. It meant nothing. The addiction roared too loudly to hear what she said. He didn't fight to find the words, the rhythm of it was enough to calm him.

He needed to store this memory away, he wasn't likely to be this coherent again. This wasn't a bad final moment to carry with him as he died. The scent of her and the blankets. The feeling of her fingers on his cheek. The warmth of her body lined up with his. He couldn't even smell the yin fen any more but with the memory of the drug's name, his body shuddered again.

"Is he awake?" Will's voice cut through his thoughts.

"No, but he’s shaking," Tessa said.

"He's stronger than he was," Will said.

Jem wanted to argue. He wasn't stronger. He wasn’t going to win this battle. His body had never felt so weak and fragile before. His joints were held together by burning razor wire and eventually that would fail too.

He was struck by the image of falling apart, of being blown apart into pieces like that exploding automaton in the tea warehouse that day that Tessa's brother had died. Little bits of him scattered across the floor because he'd no longer be able to hold the pieces together.  It was a neat and clean in his imagination. Fingers disconnected from hands and knuckles rained down like children's toys on the bedspread. No blood or gore. Just scattered pieces and failed joints still smoking after so long burning inside his skin.

That was a fever dream.

He would die all in one piece.

Here in Tessa's arms.

That thought made him want to fight his way back to consciousness to push her away. The idea of being alone when he died was terrifying but it was unavoidable. To have her here like this was unfathomable. She didn't deserve to have to feel the life slip away from him. What if he died when she was sleeping? What if she had to wake to a corpse? He shifted but wasn't strong enough. He couldn't grip consciousness tightly enough to speak and his razor wire joints hurt too badly to move more than that.

"Here," Will said and the bed shifted.

Someone wiped a cool wet cloth over his face and he tried again to flutter his eyes open but couldn't find the strength for even that. He was cold but his skin was hot and the dampness wasn't unwelcome. He let the fight go and relaxed into her voice and let himself be soothed.

"He's sicker than he was," Tessa said.

"He's fighting more than he was," Will said.

"That doesn't make sense," she said.  

"He was weaker before. He wasn't even strong enough to struggle. His eyes are moving," Will's fingers trailed over his eye lids so gently that it made him shiver just a little. "Eyes move during dreams. His mind is coming back. He's not well. Not yet. But he is recovering."

That was cruel. Jem would have argued if he could have found the strength for it. Will knew better. Tessa was an optimist and that was part of the reason that Jem loved her. She saw the best in things even if the best was just a glimmer of impossibility. Tessa would believe in an impossible recovery no matter how far away it was. No matter what madness it was. But Will was supposed to be the brutally honest one. Will shouldn't be stringing her hopes along like this.

Jem wasn't strong enough to say any of that. He managed to swallow some of the broth that they gave him and it was tasteless and just made him want the drug more. He pushed that thought away and swallowed more of the soup. The blankets moved and the frigid air hit his skin like a wash of tiny knives and his breath escaped in a gasp. He felt the burn of a stele and shuddered away from that added bit of burning pain. Tessa was there whispering his ear again but he was losing touch again.

Will climbed up in closer and readjusted Jem in the nest of blankets until he was cuddled into the space between their bodies. Will's tucked himself in close to Jem's side which left him with no range of movement. He couldn't have gotten up if he wanted to. He didn't want to. The cold deep inside him was still there but either the heat of bodies and blankets or whatever rune Will had used was chipping away at it.

He felt better. Fractionally. Temporarily.  But still, better.

He was losing his tenuous hold on reality. Maybe he had already lost it.

Will's fingers played through Jem's hair at his temple and Tessa's arm was draped over his waist but her hand wasn't touching him so it must have been resting on Will. He was surrounded and they were talking over him in low even voices. He was warm and if he didn't move his joints didn't burn so badly. He fluttered his eyes open but it was dark and he could barely make out the shape of Tessa's shoulder against the rest of the room so he let his eyes fall shut again.

He used his last bit of strength to press his back against Will's chest. Will responded the way he always did, shifting into the touch just enough that he was leaning against Jem. He felt a little more surrounded with the weight of his parabatai pressed against him. The conversation over his head didn't falter and he wasn't sure if Will even noticed that he had done it.

Jem wrapped the feeling of having both of them so close around him and fell asleep.


	27. Happy

Will was itching to do something. If he’d been back in London, he might have gone to a pub and started a fight. It was that kind of mood. He wanted to pretend that he had only ever pretended to have those moods but maybe there was a part of him that liked to take out his worries with his fists. If you pretended to be something long enough, did it leave permanent scars?

Will bounced on the balls of his feet. Will did push ups. Will climbed up into the rafters just to climb up into the rafters. He wasn’t going to test the faeries in the woods but he wanted to go climb the trees too. He went through every pair of boots he could find until he found a pair that fit well enough that he could run in them. Running in snow was awful but it was better than sitting.

Tessa wasn’t any more settled than he was but she was spending more time sitting with Jem and less time trying not to fall while running in the snow. She cleaned and cooked and moved the meager furniture around. She made lists of things they would need when they started traveling. Sometimes Will could distract her into conversations about books or London or New York but more often she gave him short answers before sinking back into her own thoughts.

Will had gone to the village and run on the rooftops. He did it in London sometimes, jumping from rooftop to rooftop to garden wall and even lamp posts. It was harder when everything was covered in snow but it was better than sitting and listening to Jem’s breathing and Tessa’s anxious movements. If he didn’t look in any of the windows, he could pretend that it wasn’t a town filled with corpses.

He came back almost tired. It had taken half the morning and he’d fallen off enough icy rooftops to be aching a little bit. He felt like his whole being was being coiled up into a tight little ball. Anxiety and worry and helplessness piled over each other. He missed training. He missed agility drills and sparring and a training room full of equipment. Of all the things, that was the thing he missed most about London.

That and being warm.

“Hullo, Tess,” he said in an exaggerated accent after shaking the snow out of his coat and stepping back inside.

"Tell me that he's going to move again," Tessa said from where she lay on the bed. Will’s attempt at humour crumbled. Her voice was brittle and it made his heart ache.

"He will," Will said hanging up his coat and trading the borrowed winter boots for his own. He kept his voice light and cheerful even though he didn’t think anything so simple would help Tessa feel better. She didn’t so much as sit up to look at him and her voice was so soft.   

"What if the magic of what they did, did more than take the yin fen from his blood? What if it hurt him more deeply than that? It's been three days and he has done nothing but breathe," Tessa asked.

"That's not true," Will said. "He swallows water, he flinches from pain and cold, he is not feverish and his colour is a little better every day."

"He flinches?”

Her voice was even more brittle when she said that, as though she was one word away from sobbing. Will had made it to the bed and he stood beside her and looked down at Jem. Jem was still, lying on his back, breathing evenly but shallowly.

"Yes, he flinches. I tried it. It's recommended by the Silent Brothers when you think an injured person might have damage to their spine or brain. If they cannot feel, then they will not flinch. But even a sleeping or unconscious person will flinch."

Will sat down beside her. She was lying in bed beside Jem again. She ricocheted between the fierce kinetic activity of cleaning and fussing with everything and these long still moments where she watched Jem sleep. Will leaned over her and pinched the skin on the back of Jem's hand. His fingers twitched but nothing more. It was hardly proof that all was well and Tessa's expression said as much but Will was clinging to the fragments of hope that he still had.

"If we need to, if it has been another two days and nothing has changed, we will bundle him up on a sled and take him with us. We can drag him back to the Silent Brothers and they'll figure out why he hasn't gotten either better or worse," Will said.

"Did you go get new supplies?" Tessa asked.

"No, we've got enough here. I get sick of sitting inside the Institute. A cabin the size of a postage stamp is enough to make me look forward to dragging this lump through a blizzard while you complain about your feet being cold."

"I'll also complain about my nose and my fingertips and about the wind ruining my hair, just to give you variety."

"I appreciate that about you, so considerate."

She laughed and looked up at him. She didn’t look calm or happy but the laugh gave him hope that she could recover from this. There was a softness about her that had come out more and more in the time they'd spent trapped in this place. They were more and more comfortable with each other as time went on and Tessa had relaxed into his presence. She still made his chest seize up when she caught his eye but for her, it seemed to be calming. She looked to him to help her bring her nerves down. She did it often. She was doing it now.

"Maybe I should go check the snares," he said breaking the eye contact and standing.

She rolled up after him and took his hand before he could step away from the bed. Her eyes were serious and they were not helping him calm down. He fell still and silent and tried to imitate how calm she was. She let his hand go and he didn't grab for it again. She adjusted his shirt front. It was a cotton work man's shirt he had taken from the village and it was missing the button she had tried to close for him. She didn't look at him as she smoothed the two sides of the shirt together where the button should have been.  

"Tess," he started.

"Are you going to be happy?" she asked.

"Happy?"

"I broke your heart and I know it and I worry sometimes that you won't be happy."

"You didn't break my heart."

"Didn't I?"

He laughed and took her hands in his just to have something to do with his hands and just to keep her from touching his chest or his hair or anywhere else that was going to ruin his ability to maintain his composure. This was better unmentioned. Heartbreak had been a taboo subject since it had happened and he wasn’t sure how to deal with hearing her say those words.

"My heart isn't your concern."

"I am still concerned for it."

"Listen to me, Theresa Gray, of all the things that have brought me joy in this life, you and Jem are the greatest. I am happy just knowing that the two of you will have your chance at forever. You deserve it. You make him so happy and that is enough for me. It always will be."

She sighed and leaned forward so that her forehead rested on his shoulder. In spite of spending nearly every night with his body against hers, this touch nearly made him lose himself. He wrapped his arms around her and she returned it until she was settled in close and breathed a sigh of relief or maybe it was him who was breathing the sigh of relief.

"I love you and I want you to be happy for yourself not only for someone else," she said in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.

“Tess,” he said but couldn’t assemble the rest of the sentence.

She hadn’t meant it like that but the word love was all he could hear ringing in his head.

“What makes you happy?” she asked.

“You,” he said even though it was the worst possible answer he could give.

“I know.”

He was starting to pull his walls back together and managed to smile at her when she said that. He was assembling something ridiculous to say to break the tension and the mood and his mind’s tendency to layer in other meanings onto her every word. He wasn’t fast enough.

She leaned up and pressed a very gentle, very chaste kiss against his mouth.

And being the unthinking idiot that he was, he kissed her back. He cupped her face in one hand and kept the other tight around her back and kissed her. She tensed in surprise and then her arms were around his neck and she was melting into him.

The kiss lasted forever.

The kiss was over before he’d even realized it was happening.

Both things were true.

No. It couldn’t be true. He couldn’t possibly have been stupid enough to kiss her like that. He wasn’t sure if it had even happened. She was blinking at him. Her lips were parted and her hair was falling loose from her braid and she looked at him like he was the entire world.

“I’m sorry,” Tessa said.

“Nothing to apologize for,” Will said.

Didn’t happen. Didn’t happen. Couldn’t have happened.

She ducked her head back down against his chest. The world stopped. It hinged on this kiss that couldn’t have happened but did. Will had always liked to balance things on knives. It had felt like a good party trick when he’d learned it at fifteen. This moment was a china plate balanced on a throwing knife by an over-confident fifteen year old.

Teetering.

Teetering.

It fell.

Tessa wrapped her arms around his waist and for the first time since the afternoon that the faeries had attacked Jem, she burst into tears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh look, a different brand of angst! 
> 
> softly chants:  
> angst angst angst angst


	28. A Trip To Town

Tessa insisted that Will bring her along when he went back to the village to replenish their supplies. Jem was sleeping and as much as she loathed to leave him alone, she wanted to get out of the cabin for a few hours and see something that wasn’t those same four walls and that view of the forest. She had been rationalizing it all morning, convincing herself that she wasn’t abandoning him, that it was only a few hours, that he didn’t need her to hover and fuss, that he wouldn’t even notice. It was only partially working.

She almost took back her decision when she stood on the porch and watched Will close the door.

“He just needs sleep, Tess, he can sleep without you. I know I said you didn’t need to come but I honestly think it will be good for you. The faeries won’t be coming back for him. I went out and threatened them this morning,” Will said.

She looked at him and couldn’t tell if that was a joke or not. He was wrapped up in a scarf and hat that covered most of his face and he was Will. It was equally likely that he was out threatening the faeries before dawn and that he would make a joke about doing it. She pulled her mittens on a little tighter and looked at the dull gray wood of the door for a long minute before nodding.

“I know,” she said.

She let him lead the way across the snow and swallowed back all the questions she was dying to ask him. They were all questions she had asked over and over again for the last few days. Asking them again wasn’t going to make any new information show up. There were serious questions about Jem and travel options and food and unnecessary ones like the possibility of a proper bath. Nothing that needed saying, nothing that wasn’t going to annoy him.

She had been snappish and abrupt with him long enough. Annoying Will wasn’t actually her goal, she just couldn’t think straight and he made her feel guilty. The kiss was dragging on her thoughts. The nearness of him dragged on her attention whenever he was close enough and he was always too close.

It wasn’t his fault that she wasn’t strong enough to keep herself together. She shouldn’t have kissed him. She shouldn’t be the one making him offer comfort and reassurance at every turn. He needed comfort as much as she did and if she couldn’t offer it, at least she could endeavour to not make his struggles any worse. She hopped down off the porch step and made a declaration to herself to be kinder to Will.

“When I was nine years old, I went sledding in a little park not far from where our apartment was,” Tessa said as they set out across the path in the snow that Will’s boots had already worn. Story telling was friendly, wasn’t it? He raised his eyebrows and gave her a smile. Perplexed but amused by the turn of the conversation.  

“It was probably one of the last childish things I did before my Aunt started buying me corsets and ladies’ shoes. I was tall and she thought it was important that I be respectable. But before that began, I had a last winter as a child. I went sledding with Nate and a bunch of neighbour children I had never met before,” she said.

“Did you go sledding often?” Will asked.

They started up the hill towards the village and Will caught her hand to steady her when her foot slipped in the ill-fitting boots she was wearing. She held it a moment too long after she was back on her feet. Another thing to add to the list of things they didn’t discuss.

“Goodness, no. I hadn’t been allowed to do such silly, dangerous things. Nate would just sneak out and do it anyways but I didn’t want Harriet to worry about me. She worried enough about him,” she said.

Will made a noncommittal noise from somewhere ahead of her.

“You never liked Nate, did you?”

“Should I have?”

“No, I suppose not. It’s just hard sometimes to compare the person I remember him being when we were small with the person he grew into. He never really lived in the real world but it had always seemed like blind optimism, not such selfish cruelty,” she said.

“He grew up bad, that’s not your fault,” he said.

“I didn’t say that it was my fault,” she said.

“You use the same tone to talk about Nate as you do when you were talking about leaving Jem just now. You have nothing to be guilty of Tess, not in either case,” he said.

She sighed but didn’t answer him. Will would be forgiving of anyone but himself. He held himself to a higher standard then he held her or Jem or Charlotte or probably even street vendors who were rude to him. Maybe that wasn’t quite true. He would forgive her and he would always forgive Jem, no matter what happened but Nate was not extended that forgiveness. Maybe Nate didn’t deserve it from her either. She was the one he had sold out to Mortmain. Those troubles were immediate and distance all at once. It made her wonder what was happening in London.

“You were going to tell me about sledding in New York City,” Will asked, dragging her attention back to the snow and the hill and him.

“We didn’t have sleighs to ride on, we just used what we could find. Nate and I brought Aunt Harriet’s baking sheets. They still smelled like cookies and the metal made a sound like thunder when we banged them into our boots. We weren’t the only ones with pots or pans to ride. The snow wasn’t as thick as this but it was heavy enough. By the time we got there, the other kids had made trails through the snow so that the sleds went faster and faster each time we went down.”

“I always liked sledding. My sisters used to tease that I had no sense of self preservation and it was a miracle I didn’t die going headfirst towards the pond,” Will said.

“It was terrifying but glorious. It wasn’t that big a hill, it was smaller than this one. It might have been an abandoned lot. I can’t remember. It probably wouldn’t seem so impressive to me now that I’m older but when I was a child, and a little girl who never got to play outdoors, it seemed like the most exciting adventure,” she said.

“I can imagine it, you leaning forward so the sled would go faster,” Will said.

“I broke my ankle.”

Will stopped in his walking and laughed. He leaned over his knee and she bumped into him. He sat down in the snow and turned to look up at her, still laughing. He had been so serious for so long that the shift to humour took her by surprise as well. She stood over him and looked down. He was leaning over his knee as he laughed. She shook her head at him and he reached out and tapped one of her knees.

“Which one?”

“The other one,” she told him.

“How?”

“I hit a bump and went spinning sideways and into a pile of debris. It must have been an abandoned lot because I am quite positive it was brick under the snow that I hit.”

Will laughed again like it was the greatest joke he had ever heard, his voice seemed to fill the empty space around them. They were halfway up the hill and he was halfway to hysterical.

“Are you done laughing at me? I was a little girl. You wouldn’t laugh at a little girl with a broken ankle, would you?” she asked trying to be stern but failing in the face of his laughter echoing off the snow.

“I don’t believe in fate,” he said.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t believe in fate but if I did, I would call this proof that you and Jem are fated,” he said.

“Broken ankles are proof of God’s favour?” she asked.

“You should make him tell that story, he tells it better than I could,” Will said.

“Tell me! You’re laughing at me so hard you’re sitting in the snow in a frozen wasteland. The least you can do is tell me the story.”

“You both broke the same ankle, around the same age. Jem was jumping into a harbour not sliding down a hill on a baking pan but you were both somewhere you weren’t supposed to be, doing things you weren’t supposed to do,” Will said.

“Isn’t it hard for Shadowhunters to break bones?”

“Very. It was evidently a long way down,” Will said with another laugh. He held out a hand and Tessa took it and helped pull him to his feet. He kept it as he pulled her on forward up the hill.

“You’ve never broken any bones?”

“I broke an entire arm jumping into a pond from a carriage house roof. I was six. So, if we’re comparing injuries, I win,” Will said.

They crested the hill and Will swept out a hand to encompass the little huddled buildings as though he were introducing her to a ball or showing her the grandest city in the world. She rolled her eyes at him and he led the way down the hill, reminding her to watch her footing so she didn’t fall and break another bone. Will flashed her another smile when she laughed at the joke.

They needed things to make a sledge that would be big enough to carry supplies and keep Jem warm. Will was hoping for a tent or failing that, canvas they could use to rig up a tent. Will led them to the mining company’s warehouse at the edge of town.

The heavy door screeched on rusty hinges as he pushed it open. Tessa flinched and then followed him in. Dust danced in the streams of light from windows high above them. The place was lined with shelves full of equipment. Presumably it was all very necessary for the process of mining but Tessa knew absolutely nothing about any of it. Will walked ahead of her, touching things and wrinkling his nose at the dust. He tilted his head back to look up at the higher shelves but nothing held his attention for long.

Tessa wandered off down a different alley when the reached the end. Helmets. At least helmets were identifiable rather than the pointy ended tools on the other shelves. She picked a helmet up and flipped it over. Painted inside were two words. No. Not words. Names. She put it back, snatching her hands back. Names of people who wouldn’t come back to pick their helmet up for another day of work. After that, she kept her hands to herself.

When she made it past the helmets and gloves and found Will standing in the doorway of a little office, she headed towards him. He was still and tense. Something was wrong.

“No, there’s nothing here,” he said holding out an arm to bar her way.

Annoyance flared at first but then she caught sight of why he had stopped her. On the dusty floor was a hand. Pale, dusty, unmoving. Long dead. Frozen by the cold. Tessa’s chest tightened and she turned back to the shelves. She didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want to know any more about the dead of this town.

“When we get back, to London. We’ll send a team from the Clave back here,” Tessa said when Will caught up with her a moment later.

“Yes, we will,” Will said. His tone sharp enough to match her thoughts.

There was very little in the warehouse that Will deemed worth carrying and Tessa talked him out of the few things that he had picked up. There was nothing here that they needed. Tools and helmets and records. The only thing they took with them was a map that showed the coastline but not enough of it to work out what country they were in.

Will was already talking about the possibilities of building a sled out of canvas and wood when they started down the rows of houses behind the main house and found it. It was sitting against the house. Leaned up against the wall and half buried in snow. It was too big to be a children’s sled and the wood had weathered to the same colour as the house behind it.

“I think it’s a dog sled,” Tessa said.

“As in a sled for dogs?” Will asked.

“For dogs to pull, not for dogs to ride. They’re for traveling in snow. Have you never read anything about the Gold Rush?” Tessa said.

Will shrugged which probably meant that he hadn’t and didn’t want to admit his ignorance. Tessa explained the very little that she knew about dog sleds with the dawning realization that were probably dead dogs in the snow somewhere around them to go with the dead humans in the buildings and the abandoned sled.

Her skin crawled. The idea of the faeries killing animals bothered her. She had already come to terms with them as murderers but the idea of them draining every living thing bigger than a mouse made it even worse. A murderer might have reasons to kill. It didn’t make them any less evil but at least there was a reason. These monsters just killed everything.

“Tess,” Will said. “Let’s see if we can get this thing to move without dogs to help. It should be easy enough to drag. It’s pretty light. Can you get it to the main street? I’ll go back for rope from the warehouse.”

She nodded. Will dropped the sled down on the ground and then ran off in the direction they had come. It was lighter than Tessa had expected and except for a drift of deep snow, pushing it out to the open space of the main road was easy enough. Will’s experiment with ropes to drag it from the front wasn’t quite as successful but they had worked it out by the time Tessa was getting antsy to check on Jem.

They left the town behind with their new sled loaded up with things they’d stolen from the dead and headed home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me and the girl who lived down the street used to call my younger brother the Crash Test Dummy (because we were assholes) when we all went sledding together. I really wanted to use that line for Will's sisters here but crash test dummies aren't a thing in 1878. I looked it up to be sure and nope.


	29. Fever Dreams

Want dragged him back to consciousness.

Sense memory pounded in his head like a bat against the inside of his skull. The char and sugar scent of the powder. The sour sweetness. The way it burned when he drank it. The pain of his joints slow drag of fleeing pain as the drug started to work. The sharpness of the world after a dose. The way energy ran through him and he was able to do the things that usually felt out of reach. The freedom of running with the yin fen pumping through his blood.

His body wouldn’t hurt. His lungs wouldn’t burn. It would only take a little. He would be so much stronger afterward.

But he had none.

He shuddered.

Annoyance whispered in the back of his head.

Couldn’t he just die in peace without addiction compounded over the pain? The added humiliation of wanting it so badly just made him angry.

He hurt.

His muscles felt dead and heavy and useless.

Yin fen would make it better. That fantasy of sharp focus and running down a city street at full speed came back again. The burning sugar. The sourness. The sweetness. The feel of the powder between his fingers. The box with it’s peaceful image on the lid. Burnt and sweet as sugar cane.

He rolled over.

He forced his aching joints to move. His muscles screamed in protest.

It hurt.

It hurt so much to just move but it worked. The pain over took the chaos of the addiction in his thoughts. If he had been strong enough, he might have screamed. The memories that flooded into the space left by the noise of the addiction were all of pain. Of being small and helpless and listening to his parents scream.

Not better.

He lay on his side, breathing hard, burning with pain.  

Other memories.

He reached for something else. Anything else. It came in fragments. Tessa’s hair. Will’s laugh. The smell of baking bread wafting up from the kitchens. This was better. Tessa hooking her little finger with his. Will rolling over in his sleep and resting his head on Jem’s shoulder. Charlotte’s pen scratching against paper as she sat at her desk and wrote official documents while everyone else played a round of cards.

“Will.”

Had he said that? Was it another unmoored memory?

“Will, wake up, he rolled over.”

Someone touched him and the world was pain again. His skin ached and the hand on his shoulder made it flare up. Was it Will? Will could find the yin fen, he always did. Jem swore and tried to push those thoughts back.

“Jem, what did you say?”

Tessa. It was Tessa’s voice because they were in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with no one else for her to sleep so she was tucked into bed with him as he died slowly. He was dying. He was dying because he-

He cut that thought off.

He tried to say her name but all that came out was the hiss of the end of her name. “Ssa.”

“You’re strong enough to win this one,” Will said.

He couldn’t even get to a single syllable of Will’s name. He was dying and he was dying drowning in the panic of his own addiction. He was not strong enough to win anything. He was too weak to open his eyes. Will readjusted his arm so that he could lie on his side more comfortably. It was meant as a kindness but it made pain explode behind his eyes in flashes of light and that was the last fragment of his consciousness gone. The pain knocked him back into oblivion.


	30. Whining

Tessa was packing. Jem was improving but it was a slow process. They needed a doctor and they needed a doctor a week ago. She and Will had made the decision to leave as soon as they could get the stores together. Tessa was sorting and organizing things on the sideboard in the little kitchen. She wanted it to be easy to use once they were moving. She was packing collections of dry stores into handkerchiefs that could be pulled out and provide a single meal at a time. It would be easier than having to unpack and entire bag of cans every time they stopped.

They had about four days worth but Will still had houses he hadn’t scavenged yet so they could get more if they needed it. They had avoided using the cans and stuck to horrible culinary choices like squirrel soup and unleavened bread. The cans would travel better so they were trying to save them.

“I’m dreaming of beef stew and a glass of dark red wine and fresh white bread rolls. Oh, and cake for dessert and fresh fruit. Maybe strawberries?” Will said.

“I’m dreaming of a roast chicken dinner with potatoes and carrots and gravy. I’ll take some strawberries,” Tessa said.

“Strawberries and pound cake, maybe a bit of cream?”

“Ice cream.”

“Too cold for ice cream, Tess.”

“It won’t be in London though. It will be August in London by the time we get back. The perfect season for ice cream. Maybe we could have a picnic. Wear nice clothes and go sit in the park while we eat,” Tessa said.

“Instead we have squirrel soup.”

“Always whining.”

Tessa looked over her shoulder. That hadn’t been Will’s voice. Jem hadn’t moved but the way Will was watching him with wide eyes said that she had heard it right. It was Jem’s voice. Soft and rasping, little more than a whisper. His eyes were shut and he looked the same. His mouth had barely moved. Will looked up at Tessa and then back down at him. Some mix of wonder and relief and love on his face.

“Listen here, you’ve been unconscious and haven’t had to eat it. There is a reason that no one farms squirrels for their meat and it isn’t because they’re small,” Will said.

His tone was light and didn’t match his expression. Will’s eyes were too wide and his mouth was open just a little bit. He let out a long slow breath that shook a little.

“I’ll eat it if you won’t,” Jem said.

Tessa dropped what she was doing to hurry across the room. She stubbed her toe on a loose board and winced but didn’t let it slow her down. Jem wasn’t moving. He was just as pale and drawn and sick looking as he had been for the past three days but he was talking and he was coherent. Not whispered sounds but words.

His voice was coarse and each word sounded painful but he was talking. Will got up from the end of the bed to go and get the remains of the soup off the stove. It was still warm. They’d only just finished their lunch. Will’s hands shook a little as he scooped it into the cup.

“Did you find some?” Jem asked, his voice harsher when Will came back and handed him the cup.

“Terrible soup? Yes, I did.”

Jem sighed and deflated. The energy went out of him in a rush that made Tessa wince. Will’s lips tightened but he said nothing as Jem ate the soup. He finished the small bowl and his eyes fluttered but he couldn’t find the strength to open them.

He said something in Chinese. Tessa didn’t understand it. Will answered him and Jem fell silent.

“Go back to sleep, dìdì,” Will said.

“I’m older than you,” Jem said.

“Of course, you are, darling.”

Jem muttered something else that Tessa didn’t need to be able to translate to know it was far less affectionate than ‘little brother.’ Will let out a peel of laughter and repeated it back to him. Tessa usually didn’t get to see them joke with each other. Especially not the kind of jokes that included swear words and name calling. Jem was usually more polite when she was in the room. Will pushed the hair back from Jem’s face and his eyelids fluttered again but he couldn’t find the strength to open them.

Will sat beside him, elbows braced on the bed and his attention locked. Will picked up Jem’s nearest hand and held it between his. Tessa thought that he might cry but he sat there with his lips pressed to the back of Jem’s fingers and an incredulous look on his face.

Tessa stepped away and let them have this moment.

For the first time in a long time, she knew that he would wake up again. There would be time for other moments.


	31. The Road Back

Jem had said the addiction was screaming.

The words were haunting Will as he stood outside the cabin and braced himself to go back inside. Screaming. It was such a strange choice of words. Will hadn't understood the Chinese at first. It hadn't made sense. Screaming. Jem was alive and getting better but he was suffering and that made Will's chest hurt.

He had tried to out run the feeling. He had gone to the warehouse and taken a handful of axes and then practiced throwing them at the wall until he could make they stick. Ax throwing was hardly a normal skill in a Shadowhunter's repertoire but they were heavy and the resounding thunk they made as they bit into the wooden wall of the warehouse was satisfying. For a few minutes, he felt like himself. Then it had been time to go back to the cabin and the words were echoing in his head again.

He pushed inside.

Tessa was lying on her stomach on the bed beside Jem whose head was propped up so he could see her. His eyes were open and he shifted to look at Will. She had pushed herself up on her elbows. Will was caught by a memory of his sister lying like that at the bottom of his parent's bed, demanding they wake up because it was her birthday. Tessa twisted around and Will caught the look of joyful relief on her face before she went back to looking at Jem.

"Finally waking up?" Will asked. If he kept making it a joke, then maybe he would be able to breathe around the feelings in his chest. He took off his winter clothes and left them on the floor as he crossed to them. He kicked off the boots and dropped his mittens on the heap.

"She was telling me what happened," Jem started. His voice was breathy and weak.

"About how you had all the blood in your body taken out and stirred around by a pack of faerie bastards?" Will asked.

"Yes," Jem said.

"You're recovering," Tessa said with force in her voice.

Jem glanced at Will. It was a silent question.

"Your eyes are brown," Will said instead of answering it.

He said it because it took him by surprise. He had had time to get used to Jem's hair. It hadn't been so long ago that Jem's hair had still been streaked with brown before the addiction had claimed the last of the colour. Tessa had never known Jem with dark hair but Will remembered a time when he had looked like this. The eyes took him by surprise. Jem looked at him with dark eyes flecked with silver and Will was fourteen and Jem was blinking slowly in surprise because Will had the audacity to lean in and kiss him one morning.

Will pushed that memory away and grabbed hold of Jem's silent question to distract himself.

"You're recovering. It's been six days. You shouldn't have survived this long even without the blood loss. You didn't move for the first four. You've gotten better not worse."

"I don't feel better," Jem said.

"You are well enough to argue with me. Your eyes are open. I apologize if our miracle cure hasn't been miraculous enough for you," Will said.

"I never wanted miracle cures."

Anger flared. Will's mouth was open before he had stopped to consider what was about to come out of it. "I already bought this one. I can hardly return it to the store now. If you're intent on being dead, you can walk off into the forest and ask the faeries to finish the job."

He bit his tongue.

Goddamn his stupid mouth.

"Not what I meant, William."

"We would have asked but you were unconscious and-" Tessa started and Jem cut her off by lifting his hand to put it on her cheek. He was smiling at her. Soft and weak but a smile.

Will was a monster for snapping at him.

"I didn't mean it like that. I am glad to be here. I would never choose to be elsewhere than here. What I mean to say is that I had given up hope of miracle cures long ago. I didn't think there would ever be such a thing for me," Jem trailed off. "I am glad to be awake again. I am glad to see you both."

Will switched over to Chinese, "You don't believe it."

"I feel like I'm dying."

"The road back from death's doorstep is a long one."

"Do you think Death grows flowers?" Jem asked in English.

Will just frowned at him. What did that mean?

"On his doorstep, that saying doesn't make sense in Chinese. It made me think of a literal doorstep. Maybe a wreath at Christmas?" Jem said. The smile was back. Not as soft as it had been for Tessa but a bit broader.

"Your sense of humour is a hazard."

"What colour would Death paint his doorstep? Something staid, I would think," Jem said. "But no, perhaps a little bit of colour. It must be tiring work to be Death, the taker of souls. A blue doorstep might be a cheering thing to come home to."

Tessa laughed and buried her face in her hands to smother it. Will groaned and rolled his head back. His back ached a bit from spending nearly two hours throwing axes at a wall. Jem was still smiling but his eyes dropped shut. He turned his hand over because he was too weak to lift it and Will did as he was told. He took Jem's hand and held it in both of his. This time Jem weakly curled his fingers around Will's palm. Will had been trying to keep his optimism from getting the best of him. It could still be the eye of the storm, a moment of calm and recovery before the next wave of the illness overtook him. But with Jem joking and holding onto him, it was hard not to believe that this was Jem getting better.


	32. Nightmares

Jem jerked out of sleep and sat up. Want made his head pound again. He untangled himself from Tessa’s arm and swung his knees over the edge of the bed. His head spun. Too much movement. He wasn’t strong enough for this yet. His head thrummed and he couldn’t think around the pounding. He wanted to stand and to go but there was nowhere to go and he knew he wouldn’t be strong enough if he tried to stand.  

The desire for the drug wasn’t something he could isolate into sensation this time. It was beyond words. Beyond scent and sight and sound. It was simply want. It curled in every muscle, in every thought, in the beat of his heart and the drag of air into his lungs. Want and need and fear. His body ached and his thoughts spun.

“I will not die without it,” he whispered to the dark. His mind or his body or the drug itself was yelling the opposite at him. He tried to ignore it. “It hasn’t killed me yet.”

He sat very still and tried to drag his thoughts away from storm of the addiction. His toes were getting cold, hanging there above the floor. Cold feet. Cold fingers. Pain in his shoulders. The weight of breathing. Each sensation helped him settle his thoughts a little more. His hair on his forehead. It was too long. He pressed his tongue to his teeth. He curled his fingers into fists.

A hand brushed his lower back, groping for a moment before flattening against his spine.

“Jem?”

“Hello, Tessa,” he said and his voice didn’t shake.

He didn’t want her to know what was going on inside his head. She was so hopeful and happy. Jem didn’t want to take that away from her. He didn’t want to tarnish it.  He would not be one of those addicts who thrashed and begged. He would not. The addiction could scream through his head all it wanted but he would not let her hear it too.

“Do you need something?” she asked.

“No, I just had a nightmare.”

It was still a nightmare. The nightmare wasn’t over yet. He didn’t have anything to take the edge off the need in his body. He didn’t have anything to ease pain in every muscle. The pain in his very skin. The yin fen had settled into his body, had changed the colour and the function of all the pieces of him. Ripping it away had left wounds too small to be seen, too small to be bandaged.

Those wounds might never heal.

He pushed that thought away before it had time to fully form. It had to heal. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life in this much pain. Breathing hurt. His clothing hurt. Touch hurt. Cold was a welcome variation. It was a different kind of discomfort and it wasn’t quite as sharp as the other pain.

Years of pain had left him with the dubious ability to function through it but this was more than even he could handle for long. Pain wore you down. A little bit of pain was like sandpaper against wood. It might take longer but eventually it could wear its way through anything, everything.

He lay back down and rolled over to be closer to Tessa. It hurt when she touched him too but it was a pain worth enduring. She cupped his cheeks in her hands and he closed his eyes and pretended it didn’t hurt.

She pulled him in to kiss and for a moment, just a moment, he forgot that it hurt and the world narrowed to her. He held onto that and fell back into restless sleep with her tucked in close.


	33. Walk Before You Dance

Jem’s eyebrows were drawn together. His face pinched and tight. Not in concern. In pain. Will inhaled slowly and then let the breath out just as slow. It took a few repeats for Jem to catch on to it and join him. The tightness around his eyes didn’t fade but he straightened his back and breathed along with Will.  

Jem was standing for the first time in nearly two weeks. It was hurting him but he’d been adamant that he didn’t want to stop. He leaned on Will. He was lighter than he should have been. Too thin. Jem had always been thin but he was birdlike now. Fragile. Will wasn’t going to say that out loud but the shape of Jem’s spine under his hand made him nervous.

Will wasn’t quite holding him up. His arm was around Jem’s back to help steady him but Jem was standing on his own. Will kept one hand out in case Jem stumbled and needed something to grab hold of. It was almost the position for a dance.  

“I never learned to dance,” Jem said in answer to Will’s unspoken thought. Will couldn’t actually read Jem’s thoughts no matter how much Jessamine joked about it. Sometimes he thought it was possible that Jem truly could read his mind or maybe Jem was just more perceptive than other people.  

“Really?” Tessa asked.

She was perched on one of the little chairs by the door, wrapped in a wool blanket as she watched them. It was still cold but the storms hadn’t returned. The faeries were evil but they were faeries and they stuck to their deals. There had been no new snow, very little wind, but the cold was unrelenting.

“I’m a Shadowhunter, I learned how to handle a sword instead,” Jem said.

“I’ll help you learn,” Tessa said.

“Why would I need to know how to dance?” Jem asked.

“It’s diverting,” Will said.

“It’s customary at weddings,” Tessa added.

Jem looked up at her over Will’s shoulder but didn’t say anything right away. Then his face slipped into a smile. Tessa nodded as though that expression settled everything. Will was braced for the sting of watching them coo at each other but it was slow to come. A little twinge of jealousy rather than the stabbing pain of it.

“Walking first,” Will said.

Jem’s expression twitched with pain on each step but he didn’t stop. Each step was stronger than the last. His first few were shuffles but soon he was able to lift his feet and take true steps. Slow. Methodical. Uncomfortable. Will moved with him, keeping an arm around his back in case he stumbled. Jem didn’t argue.

“Thank the Angel,” he said when he reached the other side of the room. He slumped a little against Will and dropped his head to Will’s shoulder. He was breathing hard like he’d been running for his life but mixed into the heavy breathing were little gasps of laughter.

“Thank the Angel that we got to the kitchen?” Will asked.

“That it hurts less,” Jem said. “It hurts less as I walk more. I thought that there simply were not enough muscles in my hands for them to hurt as much. I just used them more. My legs were horrible but just this far and they hurt less.”

“You’re exhausted.”

“Exhausted is fine. I don’t mind exhausted,” Jem said. “I thought I was going to hurt for the rest of my life. Exhausted is a relief. Let’s go back the other way.”

Jem shuffled back towards the bed and Will would have worried about him if he hadn’t been having so much fun. He laughed and stumbled his way across the room. Giddy. Will had only ever seen Jem giddy a handful of times, his emotions were usually more even than that.  When Jem was happy, he didn’t giggle. Jem’s happiness was usually bright smiles and physical affection but today it was giggling.

Jem held onto his hand and when they stopped at the bed, he held onto Will rather than sitting back down. Breathing hard and laughing. His fingers were twisted in Will’s shirt and he could barely stay standing. It had been joking and playful one moment and then the next, Jem was grabbing hold of his arms. His laughter started to stutter.

The sound made Will’s nerves stand on end. Panic. It sounded like panic.

“Are you alright?” Will asked.

Jem’s breathing was uneven and he buried his face in Will’s shirt and had to hold on to keep himself standing. That shattered panting laugh kept slipping out.  

“James,” Will pleaded.

“I think I’m going to die,” Jem said.

“What are talking about?” Will said.

“The yin fen is still here, it’s hiding. In my blood, in my body. It makes everything hurt. I never got high but they told me that if I took too much, that it was possible. If I ever felt giddy or light headed, I needed to reduce the dose. I’m very light headed. I’m a little giddy. It’s still here. I think I’m still dying,” his voice ran up and down between a breathy rush and something slower and harsher.

When he finally collapsed, Will had to catch him.

“You’re doing just fine,” Will said as he eased them both to the floor.

He knelt in front of Jem as Jem curled over his knees in a little ball. Tessa appeared at his side, draping the blanket she had been wearing around Jem’s shoulders.  She was talking but Will wasn’t listening. All his attention was on Jem. He needed to remember if there were other runes he knew that might help. He needed to do something. It took him too long to even remember to dig his stele out of his pocket.  

Jem shivered and the laughter became a cough. A mixture of blood and silver flecks that beaded up like raindrops on the pale wood of the floor.

Will pushed up the sweater that Jem was wearing and drew the iratze on his back so that it was behind where his lungs were. His body was shuddering with the coughing. Maybe it would be enough.

Jem went still.

“Oh, thank god,” Tessa said.

He shuddered again and the coughing came back more violent than it had been before. His whole body convulsed and he spit more blood and silver out onto the floor. Will swore and tried to get Jem’s attention. Jem wasn’t breathing deeply enough, he wasn’t getting any air into his body and the coughs were competing with wheezing as he pulled air in.  

He had seen this before. Of course, he had. This was just another attack. Jem had had enough of them in his life. The only solution was yin fen and time. They didn’t have yin fen. Jem had never ridden an attack like this out without the drug to bring it to an end. Will didn’t know what would happen without any treatment.

Tessa’s hand fell on Will’s arm and she squeezed gently. She was stroking Jem’s hair and talking to him in a soft even voice. Will still wasn’t listening to her but she kept her hold on his arm. She pulled him back together just by being there. He needed her or he wouldn’t be able to get through this.

“James,” Will said.

“William,” Jem managed to croak out in a lull in the cough.

“Keep breathing.”

“I wish I wasn’t dying,” Jem said.

“Keep breathing. We’ll worry about dying some other day,” Will said.

Another round of coughing racked his body but there was less silver and less blood in it this time.

“Breathing isn’t as simple as you make it out to be,” Jem said when it was over.

“You’re sense of humour is disturbing,” Tessa said.

“Isn’t it?” Will said. “He’s rather morbid.”

Her voice wavered on the joke and so did Will’s. It wasn’t funny. Their eyes locked over Jem’s curled back but neither of them had an answer. What was wrong? Why had it taken so long to come forward? Tessa’s hands were shaking and Will lay his hand over the back of hers where it rested on Jem’s shoulder so Jem wouldn’t feel the tremor. Jem needed Tessa to be strong if he was going to get through this too.

Jem unwound from the fetal curl he’d fallen into. He braced his hands on the floor and pushed his way toward a sitting position. He couldn’t quite straighten all the way but he was able to stay in that position under his own power. Will and Tessa helped him stand and that he couldn’t manage so Will had to half-carry him back towards the bed.

He sat on the edge of it. Shivering in the blanket Tessa had wrapped around him. He drank water. He answered questions. He let Will fuss over his reflexes and the pain in his joints. His eyes fluttered shut and then he dragged them open again.

“Are you still giddy?” Tessa asked.

Jem just glanced at her. The question was absurd. He could barely keep his head up or form answers to questions. He didn’t make a comment, just shook his head. The energy and shaky glee were obviously gone.  

“That’s a good thing. It means that your body’s cleaning house,” Tessa said. Her tone was even and balanced. Matter of fact, like she was announcing the weather or reading off the train schedule.  

“Is it?” Jem asked.

“Like a drunk who vomits in the morning. The iratze made the cough worse because your body is trying to rid itself of the last remnants of the yin fen,” she said.

“Not a bad theory,” Will said. “It explains the muscle pain you were talking about before it happened. The yin fen is gone from your blood but your body needs to finish working it out of the deeper places. The muscles, your lungs, things like that.”

“I’m not sure I believe that,” Jem said.

“Until we have proof that there is no hope, we will continue to hold onto it,” Tessa said.

Jem raised his head and looked at her. He was ashen and the circles under his eyes were dark and harsh. Tessa smiled at him and he reached a hand out to pull her in to sit closer to him. She adjusted his blanket around his shoulders and then laced her fingers with his.

“I love you,” he said. He leaned his head against Tessa’s shoulder and looked up at Will who immediately felt out of place and unwelcome standing over them. Jem held out a hand and Will hesitated. Jem stretched his fingers out and Will’s resolve to stay out of their business shattered immediately. He took Jem’s other hand and laced their fingers together just as Tessa had done.

“I love you both,” Jem said and Will sat down on his other side and wrapped his arm around Jem’s shoulder.

“We’re all getting out of here,” Tessa said. “We’re going to go home and we’re going to be perfectly fine.”

Jem nodded but Will didn’t think he believed it yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am a terrible person. 
> 
> *shrug emoji goes here*


	34. Know Your Limits

Jem woke up with the sun to burning muscles and a pounding headache. He squirmed out of the blankets and sat shivering on the edge of the bed. When he tried to stand, his muscles shook and he couldn’t quite find his balance. He stayed still for a long time and didn’t risk trying to lean down and tie his boots once he’d managed to force his feet into them. This was progress.

He was standing on his own.

The world wavered.

For one mad moment, he thought maybe it was the Earth that was tipping. He had been looking at the stove and it had started to slide out of his field of vision. Maybe the planet was flat after all. But no. He put a hand out and caught himself against the headboard. Not the earth. Him. He was the one that was sliding sideways.

Jem stood still and closed his eyes.

“I am not dying,” he thought to himself.

The words were in Tessa’s voice, not his own. He wasn’t convinced that it was true but maybe that was habit more than reality. He had been dying so long. He had been a little child and then he had been on his death bed, there had never been anything in between. He didn’t know how to be anything else anymore.

He was dying. It was a fact. The earth was not flat. He was dying. He could not be improving any more than the world could tilt under him.

What if it was true?

What if he let himself believe that?

Just for a moment.

A lifetime. What would it be like to have an entire lifetime laid out in front of him? What would he do with it? How did other people plan out an entire lifetime? Decades and years instead of months and days. If the days weren’t measured out like precious powder, how did that change the choices a person might make?

Jem tilted his head to the side to test the soreness in his muscles. Then he rolled his shoulders and forced himself to straighten fully and stand without the help of the wall. His legs hurt but the pain was different than it had been before. This was just muscle pain. Exhaustion rather than knives and needles. This brand of pain brought up old memories.

He had been eight years old and one of his few friends was one of the other Shadowhunter boys from the Enclave. Jem had been one of those children who befriended the people nearest to him. Before Will, his friendships had been passing. He’d never found anyone he could attach himself to but he had never been lonely. One of the children he’d played with often was a boy named Liu Cheng. Cheng liked proving that he was better than everyone else.

They had set themselves a race. Jem was smaller. Cheng had two years on him and was faster by virtue of longer legs if nothing else. But Jem had refused to let that stop him. Cheng always won. Always. Jem wasn’t going to let that happen again and so he had run himself to exhaustion. He had barely made the walk home.

“He is too stubborn sometimes,” his mother had said to his father after he had made it home. He had sat between them while his mother considered his blisters and frowned at him. The room had been warm and smelled like flowers and fresh fruit. All his memories of Shanghai smelled like fresh cut fruit. They hadn’t eaten mangoes or apples every day but his mind added that scent to any good memory.

His father had laughed, loud and booming and said, “He gets that from you, you know.”

Jonah Carstairs had a laugh that filled a space and swept up everyone who heard it. He had left the room still laughing and Wen Yu had smiled at his back before turning her attention to scolding Jem for endangering himself and the importance of knowing his limits.

 If Jem had the good sense to take her advice, he might have laid back down in the bed and gone back to sleep. Curling up with Tessa was safer. He was on the edge of his limits. His muscles were worn out. His body was wrung out and needed time to build new strength before he pushed it any farther.

He knew that.

And yet.

The answers to those questions about what you did with a lifetime were pushing at the edges of his imagination. He wanted to let them in. He wanted to wake Tessa up and have her tell him that story about townhouses and children and flowers in the window box. He wanted to fill in the details with violin music and bookshelves and Will sitting in their parlour with his feet up while he and Tessa argued about Shakespeare.

He cut the thought off.

To be allowed to imagine it all, he needed to know that he would live to attempt it. In the bed beside him, Tessa was sleeping with her head on Will’s shoulder. Will lay on his back with his hair in his eyes and his mouth a little bit open. They were quiet and peaceful and beautiful.

Jem watched them and poked at his own feelings. There had been days when Tessa’s questions about Will had torn at his peace of mind. She had watched him the way that girls always watched Will, like he was beautiful and enchanting. Jem had hidden away his jealousy, had tried to push it down and drown it before it could become something awful. In the end, Will was too good at being terrible and had driven her off before she had a chance to see the parts of Will that were worth falling in love with.

Now he watched them sleep curled up against each other and waited but the jealousy didn’t raise its head. They were at ease enough with each other to fall asleep like that. It didn’t feed into the jealousy. Instead it fed into the imagined future of that townhouse and those bookshelves and the sound of them talking poetry while he worked on a new piece of music.

He needed to know if his body would last long enough for him to see that moment.

He turned back to the cabin and judged the distance to the stove and the pot of drinking water that Tessa had left on the side of it. Just a glass of water. He could do that. It wasn’t too much. Anyone could cross a room and get a drink of water, even him.

He should have let himself build his strength. He should have listened to his mother’s voice in his head. He needed to know how much truth there was in this recovery with the same idiot stubbornness that had made him run through city streets until he collapsed and needed to be dragged home.

He made it to the stove. Got the cup and the water. Managed to drink it without wearing it. It was going well until he was on the way back. The world blurred a little around the edges and his thoughts slipped sideways. Then everything snapped into sharp unnatural focus. He was expecting it this time and kept his attention locked on what he was doing even as the high started spiraling up through his body.

“I don’t want to be dying,” he said.

His voice was conversational, quiet and even as though he were talking to someone at dinner. He giggled softly as the image of a fine dinner party in this rickety cabin crossed his mind. Silk gowns catching on the uneven boards of the floor. Too many people packed in around the stove. Candles guttering when wind pushed in through the cracks in the windows or the hole in the roof. Everyone eating squirrel soup and mushy preserved fruit. That thought made him laugh again.

The giggle was a very bad sign. He knew that. 

Damn. He had wanted to make this stupid walk without needing to wake Will. He wanted to be healthy enough to get himself a glass of water. Was that really too much to ask?

“Will?” he said.

Will blinked at him and shifted in the bed. He didn’t pull away from Tessa, he just turned his head and pushed his hair away from his eyes.

“What are you doing up?”

“I seem to be inducing another yin fen attack. Am I going through withdrawal, do you think? Like an opium addict?” he laughed again.

Will swore at him and got out of bed. Tessa protested softly and Jem smiled at her. He forgot for a moment that he was very ill. She was cute first thing in the morning. Will was just wearing socks. They were thick socks but it was too cold for that.

“Put your shoes on. It’s cold,” Jem said.

Will shook his head and Jem smiled at him.

Then the world was tipping. No. Not the world. It hadn’t been the world last time and it wasn’t the world this time. It was him. He was tipping. He tried to remember how to move his feet to catch himself but he did it wrong. He used to know how to balance on rooftops and garden walls without tottering. Now flat ground was too much for him. He fell.

Will was fast enough to get there before he crashed into the stove and set himself on fire along with everything else. No. The stove was closed. He probably wouldn’t have caught fire. It was still relieving to have Will there to wrap him up and hold him steady.

Jem leaned in and put his head on Will’s shoulder. Will was still warm from being curled in bed and he was solid. He didn’t tilt with the world though Jem’s sense of balance was still telling him that the world was trying to go sideways.

“You need rest,” Will whispered. Jem nuzzled in a little closer and remembered how to make his arms work well enough to wrap them around Will’s waist. He held onto Will’s sweater.

“I know,” Jem said. “You’ll stay with me, won’t you?”

“I will stand with you until the end of the world,” Will said. Low and fierce.

“I don’t think I can stand up anymore and I’m really hoping to avoid the end of the world altogether,” Jem said with another giggle. 

Will held him closer and helped him stumble back to bed. Tessa was awake and sitting up in the blankets. She was quiet and watchful and so very worried. Will helped Jem settle in beside her. Jem couldn’t untangle his hands from Will’s shirt now that he was holding on and Will didn’t try to force it.

Will lay down on his back and Jem shifted and twisted until he could lie with his face still pressed against Will’s neck. Will sighed and Jem could feel his chest rise and fall with the breath. Still solid.

Tessa pet his hair back from his face. When it fell back into his eyes, it was dark brown. If he’d been stronger, he would have gotten up to go looking for a mirror. The desire to see what this new face looked like was suddenly overwhelming.

Did he still look like his mother? People had said that when he was small. He had her smile. He had her eyes. It had been years since he had looked at the mirror and been able to see her in the details of his face.

There was no mirror. Even if there had been, Will held him too tightly for him to go in search of one. Jem let himself relax. He lay still and cataloged his muscles. Aching calves. Cold feet. Pins and needles in his shoulders. One by one he relaxed them. It almost worked. He started again. Thinking about each limb in turn.

“Tell me again,” Jem said to Tessa.

“Tell you what?” Will asked.

But Jem was already fading back to sleep. This was close enough to that half-imagined future.


	35. Packing

She had counted it out. They had been there in that frozen wasteland for eighteen days. It felt like a lifetime but it also felt like eighteen was far too small a number. Everything was different. Jem was getting healthier, Will was more at ease than Tessa had ever seen him. Changes like that couldn’t possibly happen in less than a month. She wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and watched the boys in the snow. 

“That is not what I said,” Will said with a laugh. 

“That is what you said,” Jem shot back.

“She wasn’t a prostitute.”

“A woman you met in a brothel wasn’t a prostitute? Really?”

“She was a serving girl. She just brought the food. Well, serving woman I supposed. She was old enough to be my mother. Possibly she was old enough to by my mother’s mother.”

“I don’t know if that makes the story less unsettling,” Jem told him which made Will laugh and launch back into it.

Tessa stood on the porch and watched Jem walk through the snow. He was steadier than he had been just a few days before. She had chosen to be the voice of optimism. Every time Jem made a comment about how he was afraid his health was turning the wrong way again, she was the one who stepped up to tell him to stop it. He wasn’t naturally a defeatist but she could feel the fear in him.

The hope he’d been given was fragile and he had not had room to hope for so long that he was out of practice at it. Tessa watched him struggle through the possibilities. His life had had an expiration date for so long that he was left staggered by the possibility of living a long life. He was staggered just by the possibility of his health improving. He sat and flexed his fingers, checking for aches. He checked his reflection in window panes and ran his hands through his hair like he didn’t recognize himself.

Will was the practical one in all of it. He didn’t make pronouncements, good or bad. He simply moved on to the next thing. If Jem said that using his muscles helped ease the pain then Will would goad him into exercise and practice until he could move without pain. Will was there to offer food or water or remind him to rest. Will was ever watchful and careful. Trying to make sense of what was going on in his head was a little like trying to read a book that was only in English. There was a lot of guess work and a little bit of wishful thinking. 

Will was careful with what he said. He didn’t feed into impossible hopes and he didn’t feed into fatalism. He just existed in the middle. But he was happy. He smiled more often. He joked with Jem. He laughed with Tessa. He told stories. Things he had read in books, things he had heard in taverns, things that had happened in his childhood. She hadn’t realized how guarded Will usually was until the walls started to come down. His belief in this recovery was written in every line of his expression and every laugh. Jem was on the road to recovery and Will knew that too. 

Jem was getting better and they were running short on time in their deal with the faeries and they were packing their sled to be ready to move as soon as Jem thought he was strong enough to make the walk.

Jem threw bundles of supplies off the porch so Will could pack them into the sled. His aim was bad but Will was doing a good job of countering the worst of it so their things didn’t end up buried in snow drifts. Jem’s face creased in frustration each time he made a bad throw but three days ago, he wouldn’t have been able to lift something that heavy, let alone throw it.

Will climbed back up on the porch to stand between Jem and Tessa and survey the sled. He leaned an arm on each of them like he was a cowboy in a saloon on the cover of a very bad novel. Tessa smiled. She liked to see Will when he was comfortable like this. Sometimes he still got tense and awkward when Jem and Tessa were together but these moments of easy contact were more and more common each day.

The day before, Tessa had started trying to teach Jem to dance and rather than disappear on some invented errand Will had stayed to help. He had offered pointers that made Jem roll his eyes and Tessa laugh. When Jem got annoyed with the whole process, Will stepped in and spun Tessa round the room a few times. He started out with dance steps but then he was just spinning her like they were children at play and she was laughing and holding onto him.

Will with his arms around her while he laughed was not something she had ever imagined being possible. When she let her imagination wander, she could imagine Will kissing her again. She pushed that away. They had not talked about the kiss and she did not want to let it back into her thoughts. She let herself imagine arguments or declarations but this was different. To just be able to laugh together, to be friends, that was something else. 

Now he leaned on her shoulder and waved a hand at the sled, “That thing is going to be awful to push.”

“With any luck, we’ll break out of their magic storm circle pretty quickly,” Tessa said. “It’s powerful, it can’t be that big. They’re too small to have that much magic.”

“You’re small and have a vast quantity of magic,” Will said.

“I am not small,” she said. “Nor do I have a vast quantity of magic.”

“True on one count, you’re very tall for girl. But I beg to differ on the second point, you have incredibly powerful magic,” Will said.

Tessa shifted from foot to foot, trying to find an answer for that. The change was something that she could do but it seemed presumptuous to claim that she had powerful magic. It was a quirk of her biology. Nothing more. It was rare. There were few if any others who could match her skill but it wasn’t enough to claim powerful magic.

“When do we leave?” she asked, changing the subject.

“Three more days,” Jem said.

Unless something went wrong. No one said the last part but it hung in the air.

Jem had had two more coughing fits since the first. Neither had been as bloody but the third had lasted far longer and left him far weaker. Jem’s health was uncharted territory for all of them. They could sit around over bland soup and canned fruit and discuss theories until the sun set every night but that didn’t bring them any closer to a true understanding.

He was bouncing back from each attack. The coughing would pass, the iratze would heal the bleeding and the next day he would be a little stronger. Tessa was convinced of her own theory that his body was truly cleaning out the last of the yin fen. Coughing it out of his lungs until it would not plague his breathing any longer.

The sled was ready. They hadn’t seen a falling snowflake or a dark cloud in a week. The only variable left was Jem and his health.


	36. The Patron Saint of Knife Wielding Violinists

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here, have two today, 34 is really short and so is this one and I like this one better.

Tessa jerked and twisted away from Will with a yelp. Jem raised his head and frowned at them. They had been talking about the possibilities for travel and the best direction for it and he'd only been partly listening. He was much better most of the time but a sort of haze still fell over him sometimes, a deep lethargy that came, he suspected, with his body attempting to fight off the last of the yin fen. It hadn’t sharpened into that unnatural focus of an attack in days and he was starting to think that was behind him. He was still restoring his strength from both the illness and the treatment. There were moments where it felt more like a warm laziness than illness and those moments were wonderful.

He liked lying here with Will and Tessa while they talked and laughed.

The furniture was uncomfortable and they needed the wood to last until they left so they had been banking the fire and retreating to bed early in the evening. It was warm enough if they wore thick socks and heavy sweaters and stayed gathered together. That the bed was big enough for three people to sit around in it was a blessing but it wasn’t big enough for them to do it without touching. Jem’s foot was on someone’s leg and he wasn’t sure whose.

"Did you know she was ticklish? I wouldn't have expected it of her," Will said.

"And why not?" she asked.

“I don't rightly know. Perhaps it's always hard to imagine a woman in corset as ticklish. I think maybe I'd imagined that you grew out of it when you became ladies," he said.

"People don't grow out of being ticklish," she said.

"Evidently," Will said.

Tessa kicked his hand away and hoisted herself up over Jem's lap to put him between her and Will who must have made a grab for her feet. They were hiding in bed to keep warm and Jem had expected everyone to fall asleep early. That the conversation had devolved into kicking and tickling was a surprising shift but Jem wasn't going to complain, it was more entertaining than how he'd expected the evening to be.

"You're not allowed to be on her side, I have known you longer," Will said.

"He’s my fiancé," Tessa told him.  

"Will's really only ticklish along his ribs about here," Jem said running his fingers along her body. She let out a little bark of laughter and started to squirm away from him. He caught her around the waist to keep her from falling out of bed and swung her around into the middle. He was tired but his strength was returning faster than his energy was, catching her entire weight while she was struggling would have been difficult only a few days before.

"Ha! He's definitely on my side," Will said.

Jem hadn't really done it on purpose but he had still dropped Tessa right back into Will's range. He tickled her again and she fought back, making him laugh and grab for her hands each time she caught him in the ribs. They were yelling at each other and had kicked half the blankets off the bed. Jem had taken an elbow to the ribs and had to scoot back towards the foot board to stay clear of the fight.

Will had Tessa pinned down with his hands around her wrists. Her head was beside Jem’s knee and she was flat on her back. They were both breathing hard and Tessa was still giggling and halfheartedly trying to kick him away. They were comfortable and happy and Jem could have stared at either of them all day long.

"By the Angel, you two are hazardous to one's health," Jem said.

Tessa looked up at him, her mouth still partially open and her face flushed. He had a little rush of jealousy. Will had had his hands all over her and while one corner of his mind took every bit of evidence that they could enjoy each one another's company with a kind of glee, another corner wanted her looking at him and only him. He pushed that thought away. Tessa’s smile was bright and he returned it.

Will was looking down at her with a lopsided smile. The expression on his face was familiar but rare and Jem had never seen him look at someone else like that. Soft and indulgent and happy.

"Oh," Jem said, his smile falling away in surprise.  

"What now?" Tessa asked twisting but unable to break Will's hold. She tilted her head back to look at Jem but his attention held on Will.

"Really?" Jem asked Will.

"What is it?" Tessa asked.

"Nothing," Jem said.

Will's expression had fallen away. The soft little smile replaced with surprise and guilt. Jem held his gaze but didn't say anything else. Tessa was annoyed at being left out of another silent conversation and for a moment, Jem didn't know what to say to her. He'd almost forgotten that the moment around them was even happening. Little things from the days here in the cabin and the weeks before that were realigning themselves in his memory.

How had he missed it?

How had he looked at everything that Will had done since she'd arrived and not been able to see through the sharp comments and the avoidance to what was really there?

Will watched the thoughts cross Jem's face and sat back.

He was about to say something when Tessa caught him in the ribs again. She hadn't been able to see either of their faces and the conversation had been silent except for that single, "Really?" from Jem. She had missed it entirely. Will laughed and pulled away from her, trying for distance and the ability to say something coherent. As far as Jem cared, it was a welcome distraction. He needed time to make sense of this. He didn't want to have this conversation here or now or with Tessa sitting there between them.

Jem reached out and grabbed a handful of Will's shirt to keep him from succeeding in his plan to get out of bed. He was still laughing and too surprised to mount a proper defense. Jem was tired and his body wanted to rest but he was strong enough to flip Will back down into the middle of the bed and sit on him to keep him there.

"Definitely on my side," Tessa said.

Jem kept him pinned Tessa came closer against Jem's shoulder and looked down at Will who was watching them both with his mouth slightly open. His expression wasn’t quite annoyance. It was surprise and wariness. Like he was afraid that this was all about to fall apart.

He raised an eyebrow in a question.

Jem shrugged in answer.

They would find a time to have this conversation. A time when it wouldn't drag Tessa into the middle of it. She didn't need to be made uncomfortable about this, not just as she was getting comfortable with Will and they were becoming friends.

"You could let me up," Will said.

"What would you do if some terrifying demon tickled you? Flop around like a fish?" Tessa asked.

"I'd probably stab them, I think if you try and tickle me again, I might try that on you too," Will said.

"I know that you're unarmed, Mr. Herondale," Tessa said. "You're hardly a threat."

"I'm very frightening, the scourge of demons, Downworld fears me," Will said.

Tessa poked him in the ribs again and he jerked. Flopping like a fish wasn't a bad description of it. Jem laughed. His strength was failing but he didn't want to give up his place in the middle of the little war going on between them so he made a show of yawning and then laid down on top of Will, settling his head against Will's shoulder and closing his eyes.

Will’s body was stretched out under him and Jem liked having a place this close to them both. He liked the way Tessa was laughing and Will kept making faces. There would be time for the difficult conversations later. Much later. Will started to move and Jem looped an arm around his waist and held him closer. Will sighed.

"Could you not?" Will asked.

Before Jem could answer, he yelped and jerked. Jem felt the way his body tensed and then his arm reaching for Tessa. Her laughter retreated as she moved out of range. Will made an attempt at pushing Jem off but gave up a moment later with a heavy sigh. He was strong enough to do it but he let Jem stay.

"I like it here, it's comfortable," Jem said.

"Now who's hazardous to one's health?" Will asked.

"You're fine, just stay still, I'm tired," Jem said.

"That's fine but I'm not a bloody bed," Will said.

"No, you're more like a large lumpy cushion," Jem poked him a few times and Will shoved half-heartedly at him but didn't push him off. "You're warm though, which is nice."

Jem opened his eyes to see that Tessa was tossing blankets and pillows back up onto the bed. Her hair was askew and her cheeks were still flushed and she was adorable.

Jem switched to Chinese and said in a low rapid whisper against Will's ear, "I get what you see in her."

Will got tense. He would have recoiled if Jem didn’t have him pinned down. Jem had been expecting a joke or at least an insult but Will responded with horror and discomfort. Jem's urge share the moment was obviously completely out of line.

He shook away the thought. He had been careful not to sit and go on and on about her until he bored everyone to tears with his poor excuses for poetic description or repeated explanations of how beautiful she was or how clever something she had said was. He wanted to have those conversations and he wanted to have them with Will.  He had wanted to have those conversations for months and had been keeping his mouth shut because he didn’t think Will wanted to hear it.

But of course, the idea of throwing those things at Will now was just more unwelcome than it would have been without this realization. More so.

"Sorry," Jem said.

Will made a half-hearted sound in response and Jem slipped his arms around him and squeezed. It wasn't much of a hug but Will chuckled in his ear and returned it. He also let a little bit of tension go that Jem hadn't even noticed that he was holding until it was gone.

"I would never be angry at you for this," Jem whispered still in Chinese.

"Because you're a saint. Normal people would be less than pleased," Will said.

"What are you two talking about?" Tessa asked.

She had remade the bed around them and climbed in on the side with more space. Jem reached out a hand and slipped it under her shirt so his palm was against her stomach. She laughed and started to pull away but he wasn’t trying to tickle her again and she let him keep his hand on her skin. He kept the touch under the blankets, where Will couldn’t see. He had one arm looped under Will even though his hand was falling asleep. He could hold onto both of them for at least a little while.

"We're talking about my impending sainthood," Jem said.

"What would you be the saint of?" Tessa asked. She linked her fingers with his and held his hand against her skin.

"Do I need to be the saint of something?"

"I thought that was how it worked, don't you need to be the saint of something? I'm not Catholic but I think that's how it works," she said.

"Patron saint of knife wielding violinists," Will suggested.

"That's specific," Jem said.

"There is a patron saint of servants who have broken their masters' belongings, overly specific is hardly a draw back when it comes to saints," Will said.

Jem didn't really want to be a saint but that was enough to get the two of them going again. Jem settled his head against Will's shoulder and ran his hand over Tessa's skin and let himself drift in the sound of their voices. Tessa was trying to outstrip Will's memory with increasingly bizarre things that could have saints while Will rhymed off responses that might or might not have been true. Jem thought having a patron saint of spiders was ridiculous but Will swore up and down that it was true.

Jem fell asleep to the sound of them talking nonsense and theology.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is one of my personal favourites in this whole story.


	37. Welsh Lessons

A few weeks before, Will would never have imagined that this could be a possibility if he had been asked what his favourite activity was. He likely would have given a sarcastic response to the question if he had deigned to answer it at all. He would not have picked this. He wouldn't have thought it a possibility. He readjusted the pillow under his elbow and smiled. He picked up a lock of Tessa's hair and twirled it between his fingers as he watched them sleep.

Someday he was going to have to face reality, someday soon but this could last for just a little while longer. Tessa was tucked in against Jem's side with her cheek on his shoulder. Their breathing had fallen into sync and Will had matched his to the same rhythm, watching Jem's chest rise and fall. Will could let himself entertain the fantasy that they were three pieces of the same whole. Breathing in tandem, working together, fitting into each other perfectly without anyone getting left on the margins.

Will shifted again, reaching out and pushing a piece of Jem's dark hair away from his face. His eyelashes fluttered but he didn't wake. Tessa responded to Will's movement by leaning back into him so there wasn't any space. He pressed back into the touch, his chest against her back, her head tucked down so he could rest his cheek on the top of her head. She murmured but didn't wake.

This was enough. Will reached past her, let his hand run down her arm and follow it to where it wrapped around Jem's waist. Will let his hand spread up over the fragile lines of Jem's body. He would start gaining weight again once the last of the yin fen was gone. His strength was already returning bit by bit though he was still tired and slow and weak enough that Will worried. But the idea of Jem's ribs not laid out like lines on a page was strange. Will was used to this body. Jem was familiar in all his angles and edges and narrow details.

He was going to be someone else as he became healthier. Not just in the meaningless details of muscles stretched tight over bone and translucent skin but in other ways, in ways that none of them could predict yet. Jem had his entire future laid out in front of him and Will didn't know what that would mean. The first conversation they had ever had had been about Jem’s death. Jem had always been dying. What did his future look like? How much of a space could Will expect to have in that future?

"Are you awake?" Tessa mumbled.

"I am," Will said.

"I'm glad you're here," she said.

Her voice was clearer but not any louder. A whisper. A secret. Will's heart hurt. There was no where else he wanted to be then curled up with the two of them. There was no place he had less of a claim on than this space with them. Later, later he could worry about that. Right now, she was glad that he was there and that was enough.

"I'm glad to be here," he said.

"We're all going to make it through this," she said.

"All of us."

She nodded. She lifted her hand and linked her fingers with Will's. He sighed a little as she squeezed his hand. Their fingers were knotted together on Jem's stomach and Will reached out, pulling her along with him so they were holding onto Jem. Together.

Will tucked himself down closer to her so that he could bury his face in her hair and press his lips to her neck. It wasn't a kiss. Not really. It was lips on skin but that wasn't the same. She relaxed into all of it. Her head tilted back to make room for him, she cuddled closer to Jem as Will closed in around her. He could smell the faint tang of burnt sugar that still clung to Jem but Tessa held more of his attention. The tender skin of her throat, the flutter of her pulse beneath her skin, the warmth of her.

He whispered the words in Welsh because it was safer, "I love you."

"One day you'll teach me to speak that language," Tessa said.

"Will I?"

"Please?"

Will laughed a little, his mouth against her neck, his nose pressed into her skin. She giggled in response but it was soft and fleeting. He hugged her a little tighter, sliding his free arm under her so he could hold her tight to his chest. She gasped and squirmed before relaxing into this hold as she had relaxed into everything else he had done to her. He pressed a real kiss to her neck, just below her ear. She didn’t stop him or question him so he let it linger.

He pulled back enough to speak clearly. "Fi yn hoffi pastai," Will said.

"What does it mean?"

"It means, I like pie," Will said.

She laughed then. Not the sleepy giggle from before but a real laugh. He felt that laugh where his hand was pressed into her stomach and all along their bodies. He had lined himself up with her so when she laughed like that, with her whole self, he knew it, felt it.

"Teach me then, say it again," she said through the tail end of the laugh.

He did, teaching her to form the words slowly. She laughed and tucked her face away from him when she was embarrassed by a failure to say the words properly. Will's temper sometimes ran short but for this, he could have laid with her for days while she mispronounced simple words. She was soft and close and he could feel her laughter and her breathing. She didn’t pull away and it was easy to imagine that this was normal.

He touched her cheek and said, "Try again."

She did. It wasn't better.

He shook his head, "One more time."

Once she got one phrase, he gave her another and the process of giggling frustration and whispered responses started over again.

Will pointed out that what Tessa had actually said involved goats and wasn't at all the sentence he'd attempted to teach her. She started to laugh again and this time, they woke Jem.

"What are you two doing?" Jem asked.

"Failing to learn Welsh," Tessa said.

"That's not true, she's doing quite well," Will said.

Jem made a happy sound that wasn't quite words and reached over to pull Tessa's face up to his. Will hadn't meant to do it but he was her tight so that she could barely move. Jem tilted her head back for a kiss. Against every expectation. Tessa pressed back into Will as she kissed Jem.

He still had one arm around her waist and though it was half asleep from her lying on it, he didn't let go and she didn't ask him to. He let her hand go and pulled back enough to rub her back.

She sighed. Jem had picked up the hand that had been curled around his waist and their fingers were laced together and held higher. Jem was smiling and Will couldn't see her expression because she had turned her face into Jem's shoulder. She relaxed again as Jem whispered something Will chose not to hear. Will's hand was still rubbing up and down her back. He felt her let go and fall asleep. Her body relaxed, her breathing slowed, her heart rate dropped back to normal.

Will held onto wakefulness a little while longer before he too fell back to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, some proper bed-sharing fluff. I knew we'd get there eventually.
> 
> I am also aware that I am abusing "happily falling asleep together" as a chapter ending line. I know but I'm not going to stop.  
> :)


	38. On the Hill

Jem woke to find Tessa still sleeping in the half light of the very early morning. She was curled up with her nose tucked down in the blankets. Jem smiled at her and just let himself enjoy the moment. It took him a little longer to realize what was missing. Will had been between them when they'd fallen asleep. Jem propped himself up on an elbow and looked around the empty cabin. Will wasn't there. He had somehow managed to get up from the middle of the bed, tuck everyone back in without waking them and disappear before dawn.

Jem slipped out of bed as well. Everything he was wearing was askew and he straightened it out as best he could then went to grab a coat and a pair of boots to throw on over the pajamas. His hair stuck up at strange angles but he ran his fingers through it a few times and then pulled a hat on. There was a little bit of paper Will had brought back from one of his trips out to the village and Jem scribbled a note to Tessa on it with a stub of a pencil and left it on the pillow.

Outside, the snow was blue in the reflected light of the dawn sky. Will had left a trail of fresh footprints through the snow but Jem took a moment to stare at the rising sun before he set out after him.

He found Will sitting on a rock, halfway up the hill to the village. He was turned toward the cabin and the sunrise beyond it. Jem knew his trek through the snow was being watched but Will said nothing as he approached. He didn't even wave or nod. He was as still as the stone he sat on. He had a scarf tucked up around his face but it didn't hide his expression. 

Jem sat down on the other side of the rock so he could lean his shoulders against Will’s back. Will didn’t always take well to being watched when he was attempting to speak of his emotions and Jem desperately wanted to talk about emotions. Will was stone still for a long moment before leaning back into the touch. It felt like he was granting permission.

Will sighed and leaned in so that his back was pressed up against Jem's. Jem tilted his head back and looked up at the sky with a smile on his face as he took a moment to enjoy the contact. Will was always incomprehensible, expecting him to be otherwise was a lost cause.

This was good enough.

"We should probably head out soon, we can't put it off forever," Will said.

"Back to the rest of the world," Jem said.

The future was vast and unstable. A lifetime of little moments with Will would be enough but watching Will and Tessa laugh together was not something Jem was willing to give up. It would be Will that would fade into the distance. He would retreat bit by bit until scattered stolen moments were all that were left of this bond that had defined them both for years.

They would still be parabatai. They would always be parabatai but this other thing between them would fade. Will would kill it. Jem had been the one to suggest that for years. Will had hung on to this thing that ran deeper than the bond even as Jem had inched farther and farther from it. He was dying and he had been the one to start putting space between his mortality and Will’s heart.  

Maybe it was unfair to start trying to close that distance now. Now that he was engaged. Now that they all had forever. Maybe it was unfair or cruel or selfish. But Jem had always hated the distance, had always missed the way they had been together before. They had grown up into two people who were dying in different ways. Jem’s body was dying and Will’s heart would some day be beyond reach.

Over the years, there had been moments when they had been able to put all that aside. After so many of those moments together, after so many of those moments with Tessa tied up in them too, Jem was horrified by the possibility of letting it go.

"Am I going to lose you?" Jem asked.

"Lose me?" Will asked.

"We were everything for a little while. You and I were an entire world complete unto itself," Jem said.

"You've got Tessa," Will said.

"I know, that's what I'm attempting to talk about."

"Very well, talk then."

"When I was sick, I could imagine that I'd be able to hold onto you both. It would be a balancing act that wouldn't last but it didn’t need to last because I wouldn’t,” Jem said.

Will made a sound of protest but Jem kept speaking before he could turn it into a speech.

“As long as you refused to look at her or be in the same room, it would never be harmonious but I didn't need it to last because I wasn't going to last either. I wasn’t. You can’t argue that. Now I am, at least I have as much a chance at it as any other Shadowhunter does. I do not want to be stranded between the two of you. I do not want to have you refusing to come by my home for dinner because you despise my wife. That state of affairs won't hold for a lifetime.  Something will have to give somewhere."

“I don’t despise her.”

“I noticed that.”

Will laughed. It was sharp but there wasn't any cruelty in it. There wasn’t any joy in it either. He leaned back his head so he was resting it on Jem's shoulder and staring up at the sky. Jem listened to him breathing and matched his own breathing to Will’s rhythm. It was the only sound in the world.

“I’m sorry,” Will started.

“I should have noticed.”

“I worked very hard to make sure that no one did.”

“You wouldn’t have been so cruel to her if you didn’t care. It makes sense. After you explained the curse to me, so much of what you do made sense but I still couldn’t see that. Perhaps I didn’t want to. You two would be a good pair.”

“No, we wouldn’t,” Will leaned forward and Jem could feel him shake his head as they resettled. Jem just followed him and kept his back pressed to Will’s even if Will was trying to put space between them.

“I disagree,” Jem said. “You’ve got the same sense of humour, she likes the same books that you do. I think she understands you more than anyone else. I’ve got more practice than she does but still, she sees you better than other people do. You’re not so incomprehensible as you pretend to be.”

“She doesn’t want me. She’s made her choices very clear. You shouldn’t doubt that for a second.”

“She likes you.”

Will snorted a bit and Jem lost the thread of what he wanted to say and how he wanted to put it into words. He wanted Will to promise that he wouldn’t leave. He wanted to find a way to promise that Will would be happy. He needed to find a way to say it all elegantly. He couldn’t find the words or even make sense of what he was asking.

Will started to pull back and stand up. The moment was failing, the light was growing and bringing reality back with it. Jem didn’t have the words he wanted but he rose and grabbed Will’s hand before he could run away. He looked down at Will’s hand then back up at his face.

Will frowned and Jem could almost hear the gates on his walls clicking back into place. The way he could joke and laugh with Tessa were getting locked back up so that he could be proper and polite and pretend he didn’t love her. That was the only solution that made any sense. That was the only way for them to move forward. Like the nights that two boys had spent curled in bed together, it was something best left to the past as they grew up.

But Jem had had a taste of miracles and he wanted more. 

“Promise me that you won’t leave us,” Jem said.

"You're not going to lose me," Will said.

“Us.”

Will frown deepened but he didn’t pull away.

Jem repeated it, “Us.”

“You like having me around which is an obvious sign that you suffer from some sort of imbalance. We don’t have to give up our training or our friendship for you to have your marriage. She does not want me around the way that you do.”

“She trusts you. Are you going to try to tell me that she didn’t cry on your shoulder when she was pretending to be strong for me?”

“Jem.”

“I mean it, why do you think that she doesn’t care for you?”

“That isn’t the problem.”

“So, explain the problem to me, William.”

Will did pull away from him. He walked up to the crest of the hill and Jem watched it happen. He stomped through the snow, each footfall a heavy crunch. Will stopped at the crest of the hill where he stood, facing away from Jem. He had his hands pushed deep in his pockets and his shoulders hunched against either the cold or the conversation.

Jem pushed himself up and his knees protested. He was better but he was not well yet. His body still ached and the coughing fits still loomed but he was strong enough. The walk up the hill challenged his terrible balance but he made it to stand beside Will. He said nothing. The silence stretched for a long time as they watched the sun rise.

Finally, Will broke it.

“The problem is that I love her. I don’t just enjoy her company. I am painfully, absurdly, catastrophically in love with your wife, Carstairs. She would certainly have me to dinner and let me sit in her parlour to discuss books but I can’t be that friend. I love her. I love you too. Neither of those loves are the right kind. Neither of those loves are the kind of affection that I should have, that I could have in a sane and normal world.”

“I understand.”

“That’s charming,” Will growled.

“Don’t do that,” Jem said. He grabbed Will by the collar and yanked him around so that he could wrap his arms around him and hold him close. Will was rigid. Jem just shook his head and didn’t let go until Will relaxed into the embrace and then returned it. Almost in spite of himself.

“I love you. In all the ways that I should and in all the ways that I’m not supposed to and you know that. I know you do. Don’t pretend that it is some sort of tragic unrequited love affair.”

“Says the man poised to get married before the new year.”

Jem laughed, “Very well, a little bit tragic but hardly unrequited.”

“I think I’d rather you were angry with me over this than good natured about it.”

“I’d apologize if I were sorry,” Jem said.

“I’m going inside, I’m cold.”

Will pulled away and Jem watched him walk back towards the cabin. He took off his mittens and pressed his palms against his eyes. He had said it wrong. Somehow, he had said it wrong. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried to say it at all. He tilted his head back and took in a deep breath of cold air and then followed Will back down to where Tessa was waiting for them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This on the other hand, was one of the chapters that I struggled most with. There was a solid year between when I wrote the tickling scene and when I wrote the two of them actually talking about it.


	39. Preparations

Will stood by the door and looked at the packed sled. It didn't have enough room on it for anyone to sit. Jem had claimed they wouldn't need it as long as they took frequent enough breaks. He was better. Not perfect but better. More importantly, each day, each hour, he was more confident in his recovery. Jem's moments of panic had faded and then vanished. Will had watched him laugh while Tessa teased him over his dancing and hadn't detected a hint of a flinch. Jem believed in his own recovery as strongly as Tessa did.

They were leaving.

That was a relief. Will wanted out of this icy blood-soaked hell. It was a good thing, a welcome thing, to be leaving.

Tessa came back out of the cabin and paused at his side to squeeze his hand in both of hers. It was a good thing to be leaving. She gave him a smile and dropped his hand. It would be good to go back to London. It would be easier when she wasn't so close. Back in London, they would be able to settle back into comfortable patterns of distance and polite conversation. There wouldn't be any more spontaneous hand holding or curling up against his shoulder or waking to her hair in his face.

It was good to be leaving.

"Tomorrow morning, we head south," she said.

"With the first light," Will said.

Tessa looked up at him and for a moment, he thought she would be the one to break the taboo of things they didn't say. She didn't. Instead she pulled him back inside to have some lunch and finish planning out the route. He followed her reluctantly back into the warmth of the cabin. Jem handed him a bowl of something made out of the remains the canned goods they weren't taking with them. He chose not to look at it too closely as he hopped up to perch on the kitchen counter and eat.

On the bed was a spread of items belonging to the dead. Tessa was sorting through them as she made her plan. She had set aside things that likely belonged to the mine's owners on the assumption that they would know more about the surrounding land than the miners themselves did. Without any way to know who was a local and who had traveled here for work, it was hard to guess which changes might give her useful information about the surrounding area.

She started at one end of the bed and made the first change.

Digging around in other people's memories left her terse and frustrated. Minds lacked the clarity of a novel or an encyclopedia or even the notes of a madman. It was difficult to force the memories onto the topics that she wanted and without the language, she was left as confused by her successes as by her failures. Will watched her mood deteriorate with each change.

The parade of the dead wasn't helping matters.

Will had made the mistake of taking some of the items from the dead themselves. The changes brought her their last moments before anything else. The first one brought her to her knees. Jem was there before Will could make it across the room. She wore the body of a middle aged man when she fell and by the time she was pressing her face in against Jem's shoulder, she was herself again. He tried to call a stop to the entire project.

“We have enough. We’ll figure the rest out on the road,” Jem said.

"I'm fine, it's not the worst I've faced," she said.

"That's not reassuring," Jem said.

"I can change into a body that is in the process of bleeding to death and survive it. It isn't my body. It was just a shock. I can do this. We need to be sure that the mountain range is to the west or we'll be in trouble," she said.

Will went through the pile while Jem fussed over her. He pulled out everything he could remember picking off a frozen body. The process of robbing the dead had made his skin crawl and it was easy to remember which handkerchief had come from the church and which hat he had taken off a corpse in a wagon. He pulled them out without ceremony or comment. Tessa didn't argue it.

There was a mountain range or perhaps just large hills somewhere south of them. One of the miners had come from a village in what Tessa thought might be foothills. She had lived in London and New York and didn't know mountains from molehills. Will didn't mention that particular opinion. He doubted that the mountains would be impassable but they were worrying Tessa and having a target to search for in other people's minds made it easier for her. They were heading out blind. Every detail she learned of the surrounding country would help them.

She needed to be forced to take a break, Jem made her tea and pulled her away from the pile of supplies to sit and drink it. Will stood by the window, his arms crossed his thoughts busy turning over the things she had said. The process was making Tessa worry more but everything she said made Will more sure that they could make it. As long as they could pass through the storm, they would be fine.  

"Do you think we can book passage from any port?" Tessa asked.

"If we can't book passage to London itself, we'll be able to book passage to someplace larger," Will said.

"We don't have any money."

"So, we'll glamour our way onto the ship," Jem said.

She was pale and drawn after changing back and forth over and over again. Her head was against Jem's shoulder as he sat beside her on the bed. They were so close together. Will glanced out the window at the fading light just so he would have somewhere else to put his attention. Jem was watching him and his attention had weight. Will wanted to snap at him but there was no reason for his welling annoyance.

"We know what we're looking for now," Will said.

"I'll recognize the road once we find it. Everyone took the same one to get here. We just have to stay near the river and we'll find it," Tess said with confidence.

The river was on the far side of the town. Will had made the walk out there while Jem had been recovering. It wasn't too far away. The snow had been swept off the ice so that it lay like a roadway itself. He hadn't set foot on the ice in case it was thinner than it looked but it would be easy to follow. It was a simple plan. It didn't need to be complex. They would set themselves on the path and then walk until they found summer again.

"You should rest," Jem said.

Tessa argued that she was fine but once Jem had coaxed her into lying down, fully dressed in her illitting clothes, she dropped off to sleep moments later. She slept either sprawled out over half the bed or curled up tight around herself. With her fingers knotted in the sleeve of her jumper and her face buried in the pillow, she looked vulnerable. Watching her sleep made Will's chest hurt.

"We're going to be fine," Jem said.

"I know."

"She's going to be fine," Jem said.

"I know that, too."

"You exhaust me."

"I'm going to go try and catch something that hasn't been drained of blood by the hell-faeries so we can have a decent meal," Will said.

Jem started to argue with him but Will didn't give him the time for it. He needed to get out of the cabin for a few minutes. He couldn't watch Tessa sleep and stay sane. He couldn't watch her sleep and know that he would probably never get to do it again. Air and a task, even an impossible one like finding something the faeries hadn't already killed, was better than that.

Knowing enough to imagine what it would be like to have Tessa was going to kill him. Their relationship had grown so slowly over the days in the cabin that he hadn't realized how comfortable he had gotten with her until she had kissed him. It hadn't snapped into focus until Jem had looked at him on the hill and repeated the word, "Us," with an intensity that had left Will unable to think straight.

No matter how Jem tried to dress it up in offers of friendship, Will was losing them both.

He was going to wake up in London and the bed would be empty. There would be no more Tessa rolling over to grab hold of him when a nightmare shook her out of sleep. There would be no Jem to laugh in his ear and whisper little arguments while they waited for the cabin to warm enough to warrant getting up. He wouldn't be able to wake up before they did and watch them sleep. Tessa would not laugh at his jokes or poke him in the ribs until he laughed.

The loss hurt and it hadn't come yet.

Will shut his eyes and then headed off into the lengthening shadows of the afternoon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh Will, you are such an angst fountain. I love writing you.


	40. Sleep

Tessa had fallen asleep on top of the blankets. She'd pushed the magic too hard and been exhausted before dinner. She had curled up and fallen asleep without even changing out of the borrowed men's clothing and into night clothes. She woke up to quiet voices and someone taking off her shoes. She shuddered out of a dream about blood and metal and faeries and sat up with a start.

“Oh, it was a dream, I had a dream," she said.

"You have the worst dreams when you fall asleep alone," Will said. He was sitting at the foot of the bed with his hand on her ankle and a worried look on his face.

"I think I'm starting to become dependent on having you there. It's not that I dream less, it's that I wake up less afraid," she said.

Will smiled at her and squeezed her ankle before moving on to take off the other boot. He didn't say anything else and she pulled off the sweater on her own, tossing it to him so he could hang it up over the foot board. It was one of those comfortable intimate moments that had become normal in the days here. Her fingers itched to grab him and pull him closer. She meant it when she said she'd become dependent on not having to sleep alone.

The idea of falling asleep without both of them near enough to touch was unnerving. It hadn’t been so long ago that waking to bodies and touch and other people’s voices had made her uncomfortable. A few weeks. Only a few weeks and now this was wanted and needed and normal.

"Where's Jem?" she asked.

"He went to bring in firewood," Will said.

"Is there a part of you that wishes we could stay?" she asked.

"Stay here? I thought you hated the wilderness and hated this cabin most of all."

"I do but going home means going back to proper behaviour and sleeping in my own room and losing you."

Will stared at her. She hadn't quite meant to say that last part. It was too close to the truth. It was too close to telling him that she had loved him for months and didn't want to give up this closeness. Either the easy conversation or the easy touching. She liked his arm around her shoulder, his hands on her waist, him tickling her behind the ear when she wasn't expecting it. Going back to a life where she could never have any of it again was painful.

Jem saved them from having that conversation and she wasn't sure whether or not to be grateful. Will had pulled off both her shoes and she stuck her feet under his leg as cold air rushed into the room. Easy contact. Touching without thinking about it. They were going to go home and she was going to have to force herself to stop reaching for him.

Jem dumped wood in the bin and shoved a couple pieces into the stove and rummaged around until the fire was banked enough to last until morning. Tessa watched him with that same feeling of impending loss. They'd just started to settle into a life here and even if it was isolated and always cold and not nearly as safe as she might have wanted, it had its perks.

She held out a hand to Jem and he crossed the room to her, rubbing his hand through his hair to knock any snow out. Of course, it was snowing again. They were planning on leaving, that's what the magic did, it tried to scare them into staying but all they needed to do was break through the barrier and it would be summer again. The storm line was out there.

"Do you think you'll miss this place?" Tessa asked when Jem reached them.

She sat up on her knees to reach his collar from the bed and started opening the coat and unwinding his scarf while he smiled at her with warm dark eyes. She paused to run her finger along his cheek bone, close enough to feel his eyelashes when he blinked and those were dark and black too instead of silvery white. He didn't really look like the Jem she was used to and she was still adjusting to that. He was radiantly beautiful but he looked different and it was a slow process to look at this face and see her Jem looking back at her. He was still her Jem. He was just her Jem with dark eyes and brown hair and skin that was a little darker and a little more richly coloured day by day as his health came back to him.

"Will you still cuddle up in bed with me?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Are you and Will going to go back to ignoring one another when we get off the boat in London?"

"Wasn't planning on it."

"Then, no, I won't miss this place," he said and he kissed her.

She still had his scarf in her hands and she tightened her hands as his mouth met hers. Slowly she freed a hand and reached for Will. Will was the one she was going to lose. It was Will she wanted to hold onto because she didn't have the promise of an engagement to keep him from drifting away from her forever.

It was also a mistake to make him part of a moment like this.

She felt him against her back and then he reached around her and grabbed hold of Jem's earlobe and yanked hard enough to jerk his head to the side. Jem swore and snapped upright as though he'd forgotten where he was. He scowled and Will poked him in the face a few times until he snorted out a laugh. Will's answer laugh was right against Tessa's ear.

"Bastard," Jem said as he came up around Tessa and shoved him in the shoulder.

Will lost his balance or maybe it was just a pratfall but either way he caught her as he fell. Her one hand was still twisted in Jem's scarf and when she started to fall, she tried to steady herself against him and ended up pulling him down as well. They landed in a tangled heap on the bed. Tessa was left a little confused about how she'd ended up on her back with her collar tugged so far to the side and Jem huffed in annoyance as he pushed himself up on one hand so he was propped over them both.

He looked startled and annoyed and his hair was damp and his face was both familiar and strange in its new colouring and she started to laugh. She started to laugh and she reached for Jem's collar to pull him down against her so she could bury that laughter against his skin. She shoved at his coat and he let it drop over the edge of the bed. She was painfully aware of Will lying underneath her as Jem settled down against her.

Will squirmed away from them and it broke some of the magic. No one apologized but his distance brought the strangeness and the impending return to normalcy into sharp focus. Tessa slipped under the covers and hid herself away while Jem finished changing his clothes. She put herself firmly in the middle of the bed, unless someone picked her up and moved her, she was going to get to sleep between them at least one more time.

No one argued with her. Jem slipped in and settled so they were nose to nose and when she opened her eyes just before the candles winked out, all she could see were his eyes and then the room plunged into darkness and Will's weight settled at her back. He started on the edge of the bed but that only lasted a moment before he rolled in closer, his body curled like a matching quotation mark to hers. She relaxed into the touch immediately.

Close and warm and for at least one more night, they were both hers.

Will rubbed her back and she fought sleep because she wanted as much of this moment as she could have. Jem's fingers found her hair and smoothed it back from her temple down to the nape of her neck. Either feeling would have been soothing enough to put her to sleep but she fought that instinct and rubbed her own circles into Jem's back where her hand curved around his waist and pressed herself into Will. Her eyes were shut, her body calming and stretching and warming all of its own accord but she kept herself awake.

"I had planned to find a flat or a little townhouse after we'd gotten married," Jem said just as she was losing the battle with staying awake. That pulled her back.

"Hmm," Will said.

"I'd hoped we would have it paid off by the time I died or at least find someplace she could afford on the stipend the Clave offers widows," Jem said.

"You thought about it with that much detail?"

"Of course, I did. I asked a beautiful vibrant young woman to marry a dying man. I owed it to her to make sure that it was a decision that didn't ruin her life,” he said it plainly and Will answered with a little hum that Tessa was too tired to understand.

Jem’s voice was different when he continued speaking. Warmer, a little softer. She could imagine him smiling as he said, “But now, now the place we choose is for us forever."

"I know."

"What if we chose someplace big enough, some place that would hold all her books and all of yours, would you stay with us?"

Tessa's eyes opened at that. Will was still stroking her spine and she could feel Jem's lips against her forehead as he spoke.

"This again? You do not want me underfoot in your home after you get married," Will said.

"I do, William. I like having you underfoot. I have been terrified for the last few months that you hated her and you would never accept that I loved her. You wouldn't stay in the same room as her. I was so worried that we would marry and then you and I would see each other for training and missions and nothing else because anything else would mean forcing you to endure her company and you had made it abundantly clear that you would not do that. I was afraid I would have to choose between the two of you. I refuse to make that choice. I want you to be a part of my life just as I want her."

"I don't want to be a part of your life like that."

Jem stilled, his fingers tightened a bit in Tessa's hair and she could feel the way he'd fallen completely quiet. She wanted to wheel on Will and smack him for saying it like that. Before she could pull herself out of the haze of touch and relaxation, Will was talking, his words tumbling over one another in a rush like they had that day in the sitting room when he'd told her he loved her.

"I don't want to be there to share your meals and laugh with you over cards or whatever evening entertainment you find for yourselves.”

A sigh against the back of her neck.

“That's not quite right, I do. I do want those things but I won't survive on only those things. I have been in love with your wife for a very long time.”

"I know that."

Jem's hand left her hair and she felt the way Will's body locked up when Jem touched him. She couldn't tell if it was a fist in his collar or a hand at the back of his neck, all she could tell was that Jem pressed her back closer to Will's body to get enough leverage to hold onto him. Will tensed and she could feel it all the way down her spine, his hand had been on her hip and it tightened.

She shifted with the movement. Her back arching and her stomach tightening and her body finding all the places it fit against both of them. No one seemed to notice her move. Her heart beat picked up and she had to remind herself to breathe.

“She doesn’t want me in her happily ever after. You and I will always be parabatai but this isn’t just your life anymore. She doesn’t want me and I wouldn’t force myself into any of it,” Will said.

"That I'm not completely sure of," Jem said.

"What?" Will's voice was sharp. He defaulted to hostility even now.

"I'm sure that she would not object to me offering you a place in our household after we left the Institute. She likes your company,” Jem said.

"And what does that place look like James? Do you think she’d be content to offer me a place in her bed? I do not want to be your strange maiden aunt living in the attic. Would you be content to offer me a place in your bed?" Will asked in that low angry voice.

"Yes," Jem said. A little laugh and a shrug and then he said it again, “Yes.”

The shrug relaxed his entire body. He had made some decision on saying that word and it was a vent on all his tension. He slid back from both of them, giving everyone room to breathe. Will was confused and Tessa's heart rate had jumped and she wasn't sure either of them knew she was awake.

"Really?" Will's voice was still hard and tight and Tessa shifted against him but he didn't seem to notice, "As much as I've enjoyed our little escapades in shared beds and too much touching, that's not really the extent of what I meant."

"Take her book shopping, buy her flowers, if she accepts you then I won't be the one to stand in the way of it," Jem said.

"And should I take her to bed, as well?" Will was still angry, pushing for a response that Tessa already knew he wasn't going to get from Jem but he kept talking.

“Are you asking me to answer that offer on her behalf or are you asking me if it would bother me? We could make this work. We could find a way to fit all the pieces together,” Jem said.

Will didn’t answer.

The silence stretched.

Tessa was still cuddled in close between them and she felt Will pull away. His anger went first but then he turned in the bed. Tessa tried to find words, something to smooth out this conversation but she couldn’t make her thoughts quiet enough to be spoken aloud.

“Just go to sleep,” Will said.

Jem kissed Tessa’s forehead and reached past her to press his hand against Will’s back. Will didn’t pull any farther away, he was still close enough that she could feel his back against hers. Jem sighed but neither of them restarted the conversation. Jem went back to stroking her hair until she fell asleep.


	41. A Sworn Oath

Will took a deep breath. Cold air in his lungs made him shiver and that didn’t help his nerves. He was skating on thin ice and he knew it. Negotiating with faeries was risky on the best of days and he was planning on cheating them. He had lied and bluffed his way through most of his life but this could mean the difference between life and death. Pretending too be worse than you were wasn’t quite as difficult as cheating a faerie and getting away with it.

There was a manual that Shadowhunters studied when they were learning the art of interacting with the High Courts of Faerie and Will had read it once. He had no practice and no training but he had read up on the subject. Once. When he was fourteen. It wouldn’t help that he didn't have Tessa there to translate their answers. He could have explained this to her and asked her to come and he knew that she would have but he didn't want to drag his fears of the storm out into the open. It was easier to do this alone.

Will had found Tessa the night she had tried to cross out of the storm line and he could still remember pushing out as the weather worsened and the wind howled. Jem was well enough to travel. It would simply be a long walk once they crossed out of the storm. Will was out in the woods at dawn to make sure that they made it that far.

Will used the language of the faerie courts.

"I want to negotiate passage through the storm," Will said to the forest.

The response took time to build. A sussurus of voices that became the rhythm of speech before he could understand the chant in that same language, "Blood, blood, blood."

They were muttering to each other in other tongues below it but enough of them spoke Celtic to respond to him in a language he could understand.

"You can't have ours,' he said.

He kept his voice harsh and angry. The story the he was selling was selfish. He needed to be selfish. Angry and protective. It wasn’t a hard act to put on. He was angry. He was prepared to put his own life on the line to protect Tessa and Jem. Now he just needed to make sure that the faeries believe that he would put other people’s lives in the same place. He kept his expression hard and angry.  These fae didn't seem to have much empathy or a good read on human behaviour but Will wasn't taking any chances.

"Blood, blood, blood, more silver, more iron, more blood."

"If you help us all get free of the snow, we will lead back others," Will said.

There it was.

A promise. An offer.

They would. The trick of this act was that he wasn't lying. Some fae were sensitive to lies and without any way to look up what these creatures were, he was betting on the worst-case scenario. He would lead others back.   

He had never been a Shadowhunter with a mission the way that Jem was. Will hunted demons because it was what he did, because he found a thrill in the hunt. Jem wanted to save the world. Charlotte wanted to uphold the law. Will just needed something to do that didn’t make him feel any worse about what he had done to his family. Maybe, somewhere down the list was the drive to save the world. It helped to know that he was saving lives, that his wretched existence was making someone's life better, but it had never been his driving goal.

He had never felt the urge to lash out an enemy in anger before. Demons needed to be stopped because they were demons and that was what the Shadowhunters did. Will's emotional entanglement in questions of good and evil didn't go any farther than that. But it was different with these faeries. This town of dead bodies and their chittering voices as they'd tried to kill Jem had left Will furious.

He was going to lead back others.

He was going to find himself the nearest Institute and bring back the Shadowhunters to clean this wretched nest of monsters out of these hills. Lots of other living bodies. Lots of people just like him, armed and angry.

So, it wasn't a lie. It just wasn’t the truth that they thought it was.

Will could hear the fae chattering among themselves in that other language. They had answered him in the same language he had spoken but Will didn't understand what they were saying now.

"Mortals lie."

"I don't care about mortals," Will said. "I care about my family. I care that the three of us get to safety. I don't care about anything else. I will do what I need to do protect them."

Family. Once the word had slipped out, he knew it was the right one. Jem and Tessa were a part of his family. Not in the same way that the people who raised him were his family but the word was still right. It also brought up memories of Jem’s invitation to come home with them.

He pushed that to the side.

“I will bring others back within the year, if you will help all three of us to escape the storm unharmed,” Will said. “If we die on the road, there is no one coming to find us. No one knows where we are.”

There seemed to be only a handful of the faeries who spoke the same language that he did. The others chattered away in the local human language or their own hissing clicking tongue. They discussed amongst themselves before one of them called out. Will looked up at the trees and their swarming shadows and waited for them to come to a decision. He kept his expression in place.

“You must swear to bring them.”

An oath meant a lot to Faerie. It meant almost as much to a Shadowhunter. Will didn’t want to make an oath to them even if he meant it. He hesitated too long and the trees around him started to shake as the faeries started to yell and hiss at him.

“Swear.”

“Promise.”

“Mortals lie.”

Will drew himself up and said, “On Raziel’s name and my own honour, I will lead others back to these lands to repay your kindness if - and only if - I and all of my companions survive the journey through the storm.”

The chaos above him died down as they spoke amongst themselves. Translations whispered between those who did understand and those who did not. A few scurried down the trees to study him. He mentally imagined himself throwing knives at each one before they climbed back up into the shadows with the others.

Finally they answered him in one voice.

“We will help you pass the storm.”


	42. Leaving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I had to move the chapter count goal posts again.   
> I swear I'm close to finished. But then I get this idea for an extra scene and suddenly things are a little longer than I had planned.

When Tessa woke, Will was gone. She frowned at the place where he should have been in the bed. He had tucked the blankets back into place and smoothed out the pillow. Wherever he had gone, he hadn’t gone in any hurry. She rolled over to make sure that Jem was still in bed. He slept peacefully with his hair over his forehead and his mouth a little bit open. She pushed the strands back from his face. Fine and soft and streaked with silver. He blinked up at her.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Hi,” he said.

He pushed himself up and leaned over to kiss the end of her nose. She laughed at him and pulled back but he followed her and kissed her again. She stopped fighting him and fell back against the mattress and pulled him down to kiss him properly.

“Where’s William?” he asked.

“He’s disappeared,” Tessa said.

“He’s Will,” Jem said as though that were an explanation.

“I worry about him sometimes,” she said.

How did you open a conversation like this? Tessa wanted to ask about the conversation he had had with Will the night before. She wanted to know what he was thinking. What was he imagining when he told Will that there was space for him in their life? How long had he known about Will’s feelings for Tessa and if he knew about that, did he know about her own chaotic feelings too?

“I’m glad that you do,” Jem said. “I’m glad that you care about him. I used to worry that falling in love with you was going to make things harder for Will. He’s not particularly good at sharing and we’ve always been closer than most people, even most parabatai. I’m glad to know that the two of you get along.”

“When we get back to London, do you think he’ll go back to scowling and disappearing into the city?” Tessa asked.

“The latter is unavoidable I think, Will just needs to wander sometimes but I’d like to hope that the scowling has passed,” he said. “He cares about you. I’d like to find ways to make him a part of our life. He’ll always be a part of mine but I want him to be a part of the life we’re building.”

He edged into the conversation so much more carefully when he was talking to her than he had when he was talking to Will.

“I enjoy spending time with Will and don’t object to his company,” Tessa said. That was too diplomatic and too careful for what she wanted to say, for what she meant. What she meant was messier than that. She wanted to be able to put it into words with all the intensity that Will had used the night before. But Will had known what he wanted to say and her feelings just spun around without settling down into anything that could be squared away into neat boxes. She couldn’t explain it to herself yet, let alone attempt to explain it to someone else.

“I want you to be happy,” Jem said.

“I am happy,” she said.

She reached up and pulled him in to kiss again. There would be more time for conversations. They would have a chance to put it all into words and make it all work. They would. For the moment, she was thoroughly distracted by the kiss. She was still wrapped up in his arms when they heard the door and Will came stomping back into the cabin. Tessa tucked herself in against Jem’s chest and shut her eyes tight.

“Get out of bed, we have places to be!” Will declared as he stomped his feet to knock the snow off his boots. He was bright and loud and Tessa wanted him to leave.

“What’s the rush?” Jem asked.

“It is well after dawn, it’s time to awaken, stop being slothful.”

“Wrong sin,” Tessa muttered.

Jem started to laugh.

He laughed so hard he had to roll over and sit up to get himself back under control. Will was standing by the door, still wearing his mittens and hat. He smiled at Jem’s hysterics and raised an eyebrow at Tessa. She was fully dressed but she had to ball her hands into fists to quell the urge to reach out straighten out her clothing and hair. If it bothered Will that her hair was a wreck, that was his problem, not hers.

Jem was up and moving now and she dragged herself out of bed as well and soon they were making breakfast and going over the last of the provisions and the plan. It wasn’t long before Tessa stood on the porch of the little cabin and looked out at the snow for the last time. Snow had fallen in the night and the only mark on the snow was a line of footprints leading away from the cabin and into the forest. Everything else, even the paths to the woodpile and up the hill towards the village that they had walked so many times, had been covered over.

"Good riddance to this god forsaken place," Will said.

She looked over at him and he flashed her a smile. Her head was still full of memories of his voice low and rough as he argued with Jem the night before. He had admitted to being in love with her the way someone might admit a deep shame. Maybe it was. Maybe it should have been but Jem had taken it all in as though it were as natural as breathing.  Will had been harsh and frustrated. There was no trace of those emotions in Will now. There was only the smiling boy with his dark blue eyes and his hair hidden away beneath a wool cap.

Tessa tried to imagine the life that Jem had laid out the in the dark the night before. The idea of having Will there every day. She gave herself a moment of imagining mornings spent together and evenings wrapped up in each other. She liked the idea of walking through bookshops with Will on quiet afternoons and of filling a house with bookshelves and fresh flowers and having them both there. Trying to resolve details just made her head hurt.

Will kept pulling her attention and he climbed up to stand on the porch rail of the cabin and look at the sky. He seemed optimistic about the trip but storm clouds were already brewing on the horizon. The magic of this place would try to force them to stay. There would be more snow falling by the time they started to walk.

"Do you think we can make it through the storm?" she asked.

"Yes."

"What makes you so optimistic?" Jem asked looking at the clouds.

"I went to ask the neighbours for some assurance this morning."

That's where he had been. She had let herself believe it was just because he had gone out to bring in wood or check the sled. Of course, he had done something like that. Tessa felt silly that she hadn’t thought of it herself.

"The little blue monsters?"

"The very ones. They'll lead us out. I have their word on that."

"What did you promise them?" Tessa asked.

Will flashed her a wide grin. "I told them the truth. That we would bring others back to this place."

"We are not-" Tessa started and then trailed off.

Wasn't that exactly what they had discussed before? Finding an Institute and making sure that Shadowhunters were sent to this place? Will gave her a big smile as he watched the realization dawn on her face. He was obnoxiously proud of himself. He preened a little as everyone else realized the details of his plan. Jem let out a little bark of laughter and Will pointed at him and nodded.

"Shadowhunters keep their vows," Will said. "We are bound to our word almost as tightly as the Fae are. We can lie but to break a vow is something different. The law is very strict in that matter. I just had to explain that to the faeries. We will bring back others. They may not like the people we choose to bring but that will be on them for not negotiating carefully enough."

“We have to make it out of here first,” Jem said joining them beside the sled. He was still gaunt from the illness. His skin was stretched too far across his cheek bones and he held himself carefully as though afraid of making his joints ache but there was colour in his face and he grinned back at Will’s smug smile.

There was no more ceremony to leaving than that. The place had been home for nearly a month but none of them looked back as they pushed off through the snow.

They made it past the town and out to the makeshift port where a river barge sat frozen in the ice. There was a little hut beside it to register new arrivals or cargo or whatever else might come in on river barges but that was as empty as everything in the village. It was beyond that that the first trouble started. The snow fell softly at first but the sky was rapidly darkening.

The edge of the storm was not far away. The weather held off until they crossed that invisible boundary and then the wind started to blow. The clouds started to gather like a warning and Tessa’s heart fluttered with the memory of the last time she had failed to cross out of the storm. Jem caught her hand and squeezed.

It was a gentle snowfall one moment and a blizzard the next.

Tessa had thought her clothing was warm enough until the wind started tearing at it. Her cheeks stung and she pulled her hat down farther and her scarf up higher. It did less than she wanted. Her fingers were cold inside her mittens even though Jem and drawn a warmth rune on the inside of the fabric. It glowed against her palms but barely made a dent in the cold. 

There was no trace of the faeries who had promised Will help.

Tessa could barely see through the snow. Will had brought a length of rope for them to all hold on to so they could stay together and she simply closed her eyes and held on and kept walking.

When she had attempted to make it out of the storm as a vampire, she hadn't gone along the river. That landmark made it easier for them go see that they were going in the right direction. At least they weren't going to get lost for the first two miles. The storm was thick but the river had trees running along either side that were tall enough to see even through the driving snow.

It was impossible to say how far the storm reached. The problem would come when the river curved east and they would need to set out away from it. Tessa knew what that road looked like. She had seen the image of it in the minds of the miners who had come across land. The sight of the river had told them that they were close to their new home. That assumed that she would able to see anything. The copse of trees by the water, the homestead in the distance. She knew it but she didn't know if she would recognize it through the snow.

They caught sight of the first flash of light near the water. Will called out a warning and they all came to a stop. He was walking ahead and leaving a trail for the other two to follow. Jem was pulling the sled. Neither of them were tired enough yet go give up on being gentlemen and let her help.

Tessa hadn't seen that first flash but Will let out a whoop and yelled, “Bloody late, you little bastards,” in English.

She caught sight of the second.

A ball of blue green light in the snow. The same balls of light that had lit the faeries’ work when they had taken Jem’s blood. The lights bobbed a head of them. Too high. The faeries were in the trees by the water. Then to their right as others joined them and scampered along the snow. The snow was thick and the lights were the only detail that Tessa could make out.

“Didn’t they call themselves Kings of the Storm or something?” Jem said.

“Or Lords of the Forest. Something like that,” Tessa said.

“You’d think they would be able to clear the storm if they were its ruler,” Jem said.

They struck out from the river bank, following the balls of light into the storm. Tessa said a little prayer to any angels that might be listening that they could trust the faeries. She stayed close to Jem but he didn’t falter or hesitate as they pushed onwards. He didn’t admit to leaning on the sled to keep his balance as much as to take a turn pushing it forward but his steps were surer when he had something to hold onto.

“Let’s hope the damn faeries aren’t leading us to our deaths,” Will said cheerfully.

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” Tessa said.

“Well, I can’t catch the words and put them back in now, the wind has blown them away.”

Tessa laughed. She was cold and sore and her eyes stung when she opened them to try and see where they were going but she laughed. Will nudged her and she hurried forward after Jem and the sled and the lights in the snow.

The lights bobbed along ahead of them and Tessa kept her attention on her feet. She didn’t look at the faeries. She didn’t look up at all. As long as she imagined that she was trusting Will instead of trusting them, her worries stayed in the back of her mind. It was hard to trust the faeries when even if their intentions were pure, she didn’t trust them to be able to do what they had promised.

She took her turn to push the sled. Will was there at her side, calling instructions and advice and probably jokes out over the wind. She only heard a fraction of it over the wind. That she had tucked her head down into the nest of her scarf and pulled her hat down tight over her ears probably didn’t help her hear. It also wasn’t enough that her ears didn’t ache with cold.

The lights swirled in the snow. Wasn’t there a myth about creatures in bogs who drew in children with bright shiny lights only to drown them? She shook that thought away. The faeries were not taking them out to be drowned or frozen. They had made a deal and the faeries couldn’t lie.

They pushed on and she imagined that the snow might be slowing.


	43. The Storm Line

The snow tapered off from a blizzard to fat gentle flakes that drifted down to form a thick carpet. Jem's every joint burned and the desire for yin fen was riotous in his head. He pushed both things aside. He needed rest but if the storm was weakening then they must have come close to the edge of it and he didn't want to be the one who made them all stop in the cold. He would be fine a for a little longer. There was still so much to learn about how his body functioned when it wasn’t on the brink of death but he was sure that he could make it a little farther.

The physical act of walking wasn’t as much of a concern. He could deal with being tired. He wanted yin fen far more than he wanted a bed or a hot bowl of soup. He put all his thoughts into his steps and the same repeated words. He did not need the drug. His body wanted the drug out of habit and nothing more. He did not need it. He had a lifetime to live and he didn’t need the drug. He took a step to go with each word.

"Little bastards, get out of the way," Will said.

His voice brought Jem's attention back to the moment. He had been lagging and he hurried to fall into step with Tessa as they all came to a stop. Ahead of them was a pair of trees. Hanging from the branches and gathered in the roots at the base of the tree were the faeries. Jem stared at them in fascination. He had seen far less of them than Tessa or Will had. That they were nearly human shaped in spite of their size just made the details of them more unsettling. Too long, too thin, eyes that were too big and too far apart. Each one was nearly identical to all the others and when they spoke, they spoke in a single overlapping voice.

Will snarled back a response in a High Celtic dialect that Jem had never bothered to learn. He knew enough ancient languages to make it through the documents that they had been expected to read in lessons. But he had focused on languages that showed up in spell books and histories they might need to research a demonic threat. The Celts hadn’t been big on writing books and Will’s decision to learn an ancient spoken language that no one knew but the high fae had seemed ridiculous at the time. 

There was a chorus of whispers among the creatures before one of them answered him in the same tongue.

Will's response wasn't polite. The tone was enough to make that very clear.

"What's he saying?" Tessa asked.

"Haven't any notion," Jem admitted.

"I'm suggesting that if they don't like the deal we made, we could renegotiate and we could see how many of them the three of us can kill," Will called back cheerfully.

"Will!" Tessa sounded alarmed.

"They'll let us pass. They can’t stop us now," Will said with a shrug.

He spoke again in the other language and the faeries finally hissed out a final answer and then dispersed, climbing up into the tree and vanishing from sight, leaving only footprints in the snow behind them.

"I hope we never see them again," Tessa said.

"Is it wrong to feel a little bit of affection for them?" Jem asked.

"They tried to kill you once," Tessa said.

"And in the process, they gave me back my life. I think that's worth a little bit of affection. I still think we should make sure the Clave comes out here and cleans out the entire forest before they move south in search of more mundanes to bleed dry but I'm still thankful to be here."

"For that, I will consider thinking well of them for a solid minute," Will said.

Tessa made a small sound and leaned her shoulder against his. Disapproval mostly, maybe a little bit of begrudging amusement. Will laughed and wrapped his arm around her and held her close to his side. He turned around and looked at Jem. There was snow on his eye lashes and crusted onto his hat and scarf. His eyes were the brightest thing about him. He was smiling. Jem couldn't see more than his eyes but that was enough to make it very clear.

It took Jem a moment to realize why Will was so happy. It was still cold and snowy and the faeries couldn’t be far away. Once he realized why Will was smiling, Jem brushed the snow off his scarf and pulled it down from his face so he could grin back.

They'd made it out of the storm. All of them.

"There was a corner of your heart that doubted it right up to this minute, wasn't there?" Jem accused him.

"Doubted what?" Tessa asked.

"That we would live through this," Jem said.

"He did not," Tessa said.

"I can't resist a lost cause," Will said.

He took off his hat and shook some of the snow out. The flakes had stopped falling. They still stood knee deep in the snow but the day around them was clearing. The snow wasn’t falling any more and the clouds were thinning. The journey wasn’t over but they were free of the storm. The clouds above were flat slate gray and the sun was nowhere to be seen but the worst was over.  

Jem laughed again. Watching Will smile, really smile, was such a rare pleasure that Jem found himself caught up in. Will pulled his hat back on and wrapped an arm around Jem's neck so that he could press their foreheads together. He stood there with an arm around Jem’s neck and his other around Tessa and spoke in a low intense voice.

“Do not ever do that again,” Will said.

“Do what?” Jem asked still smiling at him.

“Come that close to leaving me.”

“And I thought you would be disappointed to be stuck with me for the duration,” Jem said.

Will shook his head and Jem laughed. There was genuine emotion in Will’s face but Jem wasn’t sure what it was yet. Will looked desperate but the relief that they had survived was stronger. The look in Will’s eyes couldn’t overpower the smile. They stood in the snow with their foreheads together and Jem just kept smiling.

Will sighed and then tilted his face up and pressed his mouth to Jem’s.

The kiss was quick and gentle. Lips together. So soft. Jem returned it before he remembered that he was standing there in the wilderness with his arm around Tessa. He tilted his head and reached out to pull Will in a little closer. Tessa shifted beside him and he was pulled back down out of half mad fantasies and into the moment. Will let him go. For a moment neither of them could think of anything to say. They hadn’t pulled back too far, Jem still had his arm around Will’s neck and Will still had his arm around Tessa.

Will muttered something that was probably a swearword in Welsh.

“Oh,” Tessa said.

“I’m very s-” Will started.

She cut him off before Jem had remembered how to speak. She said, “Don’t be.”

Jem had been holding onto her and she was close to them both. She leaned up and kissed Will on the cheek and then just as quickly she kissed Jem on the mouth and then she was pulling away and breaking the little circle. Jem watched her go. Will was still staring at Jem. Tessa adjusted her hat and gathered up the reins to their sled. 

"It may not be snowing anymore, but it's still cold here. We should keep moving," Tessa said.

Jem watched her as they walked but she didn't mention the kiss and when she caught him looking, she would smile and then turn her attention back to the walk. It was not condemnation but he didn’t know what it was. When they had spoken in the morning, she had given him enough hope to fuel the imagined future where they could be something together but he didn’t know what she was thinking.

Jem finally let Will get ahead of them enough to feel like they had a moment of privacy. Will didn’t turn back or ask questions. He let Jem put distance between them just as he had found pretenses to give them space before. Jem watched Will's back as he pulled ahead. There was no more wind, it had been left behind with the storm. The day was bright and blue around them and the empty space meant their voices were going to carry. It was an illusion of privacy rather than the real thing but maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have Will listening in on this one.

"Are you going to mention it?" Jem asked.

"I wasn't," she said.

"It was… I should... Or," Jem sighed. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say.

"I'm not bothered. I know how much you care for him. That's hardly a surprise."

"There is a world of difference between the care one has for a friend and the desire to kiss someone repeatedly," Jem said.

He watched Will tilt his head and could almost picture him flinching and making a face in response to that comment. There were more delicate ways to phrase things. Will would think he was being ridiculous for saying it. He was being ridiculous. He just wanted to force her to tell him what she was feeling and pushing the issue was the only option he had come up with.  Tessa was watching him, not Will and the illusion that Will couldn't hear them held for her.

“I know that,” she said.

"I was expecting a different reaction," Jem said.

"I am still confused as to what my reaction is," Tessa admitted. She sighed and then shrugged, "I am surprised by it but it does not upset me. I know you both and I have watched how you can both tear yourselves to pieces over one another. It is only surprising because you are both men but perhaps I shouldn't be surprised by that either."

Jem nodded.

She fell silent again. She held his arm and leaned against his shoulder a little as they walked. It was nice to have her so close. It was impossible to tell whether she was worrying or not. He kept his attention on her face, hoping for an explanation that he could make sense of. Her attention was on Will ahead of them and Jem watched her think.

When she came to a decision, she turned and looked up at him. Her face was so familiar. He had told her once that she was home for him and when she looked at him like this, he was even more sure that was true. Behind her, a snow-covered field stretched away to a windbreak of trees. She wore thick wool and borrowed clothes in a hodgepodge of colours and patterns. She was still his Tessa. She would always be his Tessa, no matter what she was wearing. Her eyes were bright and careful and he held her gaze.

"Do you think he'll agree?" she asked.

"Agree with what?" Jem asked.

"Do you think he'll agree to your invitation to live with us?" she asked.

"You heard that?"

"I was lying in the middle of it while you were arguing. It was hard to miss."

"I don't think he will."

"Why?"

"He would feel like he was intruding. Like it was improper."

"Would he be more likely to agree to it if I asked him instead of you?"

Jem looked at her and she was looking up at him. Her expression hadn't gotten any more readable. She wasn't saying something. There was something about that question that he hadn't fully understood yet. It clicked into place. It was the last piece of a puzzle that he thought was already solved. Her attention jumped back to Will than to him again. He stopped in the snow and she stopped with him.

"You're the reason. The reason he went out and finally found a way to break his curse. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t his sister. It was you," Jem said. "Of course, you're the reason. I should have put that together as soon as I realized how much he loved you."

"Jem-"

Jem kissed her instead of trying to explain it. He said, "You love him as much as he loves you. You always have."

"I didn't. Not always. He made it hard to tolerate being in the same room with him. He would swing wildly between these moments of quiet kindness and harsh cruelty. I think I wanted to love him far longer than I have actually been able to trust him enough to try. I should have let it die. That feeling. The very inclination to have that feeling. I had made a promise to you."

"He's incredibly easy to fall in love with," Jem whispered. 

Tessa sighed and leaned into his shoulder a little harder. He turned and pulled her into his arms and she held on. Jem wished for summer so he could bury his face in her hair and run his hands over her skin but he settled for this. She was bundled up thickly and so was he but it was enough to hold onto her. They spoke quietly enough now that Jem was sure that this conversation was truly private.

"I love you," she murmured in a very quiet voice.

"One need not preclude the other," Jem said. "I love him too."

Tessa nodded and Jem pulled her face up for a kiss. She startled a little as he kissed her hard but before he could pull back and question it, she kissed him back. Against the cold of the world around them, her mouth was impossibly warm. He let himself lean into this kiss and indulge that fantasy of a place for the three of them that was warm and bright and shared.


	44. The Other Side

They passed out of the artificial winter and found themselves standing in another barren field. This one was ringed with tattered fencing and a neat windbreak of trees on the north side. The land in front of them had once been a farm. The crops were long dead. Weeds choked the field and even those were gray and brown. The snow had only faded a few feet behind them and the cold lingered. The summer plants couldn't grow here. It was impossible for Tessa to say how long it had been since the field had last been tended or planted but the crumbling fence posts looked ancient.

"What came first? The faerie storm or the miners?" Will asked. Tessa loosened her scarf and brushed the last of the snow off her jacket. She looked up to see him looking back over the snow with a frown. He waved a hand at it and said, "Did some idiot mundane look at a magical storm like that and think, ‘Oh yes, I must go set up a mine in the middle of this unnatural mess!’ Or did the faeries find the miners and set up the storm to trap them there while they drained them of blood and shipped the iron off to be made into automatons?"

"Not to mention, how did Mortmain get his hands on so much of it?" Jem asked. "Do all his automatons have blood iron pieces?"

Tessa's shivered. "Are you implying that there could be more dead towns out there?"

"Those faeries might have called themselves Kings of the Storm but they couldn't control it. They told you they would help you to get out through it but they had to lead us out. They couldn't just turn it off. They weren't all that bright or organized," Jem said.

"I've seen cockroaches that are better organized," Will said.

Tessa was caught by a rush of anger. Mortmain and his plot. All those dead people in the village. All the dead werewolves that Mortmain had gotten addicted to a fatal drug so that they could work for him. Agatha and Thomas. People she had never met and might never know anything about. There were so many dead people in this. People who had lost their lives for one man’s mad schemes. She finished brushing off her coat and readjusting her scarf and pushed past a loose bit of fence to drop into the field beyond. She started to stomp across the snow.

"Where are you going?"

"Back to London," she said.

"Maybe we should stop for something to eat?" Will said.

"At the very least, let's find the farmhouse," Jem added.

Tessa paused in the field. She turned to look back at them and they were standing shoulder to shoulder in front the sled, watching her. Will cocked his head to the side. It was reassuring to see them standing there together. They had come terrifyingly close to living in a world where Jem never got to cast Will another glance like that. Like they were sharing a silent conversation. They needed to be together for the world to feel right.

"Very well," she said. "But I want this done. I want to go back to London and sort out where Mortmain is hiding and end this whole nightmare. It was one thing when he was targeting me. I knew that he had plans against the Shadowhunters. I know that he is responsible for Thomas and Agatha's deaths. I know. Nothing has changed but it all looks different."

"Mortmain's reach goes farther than we thought," Jem said.

"And I'm a part of his godforsaken web," the words tumbled out before she had decided to say anything.

Will crossed the space to her and caught her face in his hands. He leaned in close enough that all she could see were his midnight blue eyes. "You are blameless in all of this. Don't borrow that guilt."

"It's not guilt," she said.

"It's a duty," Jem explained and Tessa nodded without looking away from Will.

"I know that I did nothing to those people but I am a piece of the puzzle that they died in. They died and I can't help but feel like it is my responsibility to at least understand why it happened," she said.

Will nodded then pulled back and grabbed her by the shoulders. She startled and frowned up at him. His expression was solemn and it unnerved her until he started to talk again. Instead of something profound or poetic, he leaned in until they were nose to nose and declared, "Heroic duties to the departed are all poetic and wonderful. But first, lunch.”

He whirled her around so she was facing away from the snow. She hadn't realized that the moment was intimate until he had broken it. She didn't look at him again as they unloaded their now useless sled. Tessa had expected to get a few more miles of use out of it but she was too glad to see the snow behind them to complain over having to carry a pack of supplies as they set out across the tangled field.

 

The farm house was a gray wood building made of interlocking logs with a peaked roof. It was only in marginally better repair than the cottage they had left but it was much larger. Tessa sighed at it. She had been hoping for something a little bit better appointed but the windows, at least, were large and unbroken and it had a second floor. Bigger and hopefully warmer was a good start.

There was an over grown garden in the front but despite the cold, there were green leaves mixed into the chaos of vines.  Tessa paused as they passed by to peek at it as they went by. The vines were clinging to life but they hadn’t grown any fruits or vegetables that she could take. The leaves were probably just hardy weeds, nothing edible. She let the hope of fresh food go.

Inside, they found a small hallway that held only a few scattered items. A broken basket, a broom, a pair of old shoes with one loose sole. The people who had lived her had left on purpose. This was an abandoned house but it was not like the houses in the mining village where people had died suddenly in the middle of living their life. This was a place that had been left, on purpose, by people with a plan.

They found the kitchen with a long dining table and benches. Upstairs were three bedrooms, two small and one larger. A broken wooden toy had been left on a dresser. A child sized dress still hung over the foot of one of the beds. A family had lived here. Tessa stood in the doorway of the child’s room and looked at the little dress.

“Do you think they survived?” Tessa asked.

“I think so,” Jem said. “They packed up and left. They didn’t die here.”  

“I’d leave too if a mystical death storm appeared on the edge of my property,” Will said.

They made a meal out of the preserves they had brought, there was nothing in the pantry to add to the mushy fruit and hard biscuits. The kitchen warmed up far faster than their cabin ever did and Tessa found herself relaxing as they sat and talked about the next direction they needed to head in. She hadn’t been able to just sit in a room and be warm in so long.

“Can we make it to that inn that the surveyor stayed at before night fall?” Will asked.

Tessa was the one who had found that memory. The surveyor had helped draw the maps to plan where each mine shaft would be dug. His memories had been some of the most useful that she had found while working through the memories of the dead. She was trying to pull up details from the change when Jem spoke.

“No,” Jem said.

Will shot him a sharp look.

“I am fine,” Jem said. “There is no headache or giddiness or unnatural pain. I have just been in bed for better than two weeks and I am exhausted after slogging through that much snow. If we were in danger, I would say we should go on. I could force myself to go on but this place is warm and dry and I don’t want to over extend myself if it isn’t necessary.”

He looked fine. The colour in his skin was good. His eyes were bright and he wasn’t moving with a limp as he had walked around the kitchen to help cook. He caught her looking and gave her a pointed look. She nodded. She would let this go if he wanted to let it go.  

“Do you think they had a well?” Tessa asked before Will could start in on questions about Jem’s health that Jem obviously did not want to answer. If he wanted to rest, that was explanation enough. They would rest. Tessa wasn’t going to let herself sink back into worrying and she wasn’t going to let Will do it either.

“Why?” Will asked.

“I want a bath. I’m going to go find the well,” she said.

Gathering and carrying water back in from the well, heating it and filling a basin they found in one of the outbuildings was a process. Tessa resolved that the next time she saw Sophie, she would tell her how grateful she was that Sophie had brought water for her to wash with in the mornings.

And after all the work, there wasn’t a basin big enough for a true bath. Still, it was enough to wash her hair and the process of properly washing made her feel better. The privacy of a room to herself gave her time to do more than just wash her face and hands. Once she felt well scrubbed and clean, she changed into another dress stolen from the village and washed everything she had been wearing.

When she made it back to the main room, Will and Jem were leaned over the table to have one of their barely spoken conversations. Odd sentences here and there and a lot of expressions and hand waving that seemed to make perfect sense to the two of them but was lost on the rest of the world. Sometimes she could follow it but whatever this was, she didn’t understand what they were discussing.

“Where did you find a razor?” Tessa asked rubbing Jem’s face with her palm. He grinned and pulled away from her.

“I brought a bunch from the village,” Will said.

“A bunch?”

“I also have a collection of steak knives and a few axes,” Will said.

“You brought shaving kits along in case we needed weapons?” Tessa asked.

“We don’t have many real weapons so we were going to have to make do with what we could find. Razors are sharp and because they’re light, they’re good for hand to hand combat.”

Tessa glanced at Jem who shrugged like it was a perfectly reasonable statement to make. Tessa tried to picture someone fighting a demon with a straight razor and it didn’t seem like a good idea. 

“Have the two of you been in many shaving fights?”

“No,” Jem said.

“Sometimes mundane gangs will use razors if they can’t get their hands on real weapons,” Will said.

“A fascinating fact,” Tess said.

Will made a face at her which made her laugh. She was glad that they had found another place to rest. She was glad to have enough water and enough space to really clean up. She was glad to have them sitting beside her and debating how effective various household blades might be in a true fight.

She sat with her shoulder against Jem’s and let the conversation wash over her. It was good to feel safe and warm and know that they were going home.


	45. A Bad Habit

Magnus Bane knew better than to get involved with Shadowhunters. They were annoying. They were just humans, just mortals and they all thought that they were something special. Superior little bastards, the lot of them. Magnus knew better and yet he had gone and made friends with William Herondale. He had not just taken a contract because it was good money and a good way to stay on the Clave’s good side. No. He’d gone and gotten attached like a child who brought home a stray puppy.

William Herondale was a stray puppy and now that stray puppy had gone and gotten lost.

When Charlotte Branwell had sworn him to secrecy before leading him down into the crypt below her Institute, he hadn’t been quite sure what to expect. Runes scrawled on the wall and scrape marks on the stone floor below it hadn’t been on his list of expectations. The runes were all Nephilim runes and Magnus didn’t know them well enough to know what they were meant to do. It was evident from the expressions of the assembled that whatever had happened was bad.

Charlotte had explained it in her soft even voice while a small black-haired girl who couldn’t be more than fifteen stood nearby and vibrated with energy. Fury? Horror? It was hard to tell what it was but she undermined all of Charlotte’s attempts at appearing collected and reasonable. Henry Branwell stood off to the side, frowning at the runes and ignoring all the people.

Once the explanation was done, Magnus turned and joined Henry in staring at the wall.

“You succeeded in designing a portal,” Magnus repeated for the third time. “Using only runes from the Gray Book? I’ve never known a warlock who would even attempt that and you did it with the Gray Book?”

Henry Branwell had stuttered through the explanation and at first Magnus had written him off as an idiot and a madman but then he’d started looking at the portal plans. Once he was calmer and Magnus was less upset, Henry explained the runes and the way he had connected them to create the spell. It was intricate and brilliant. Magnus had spent much of the last few weeks talking to Henry Branwell. Charlotte was the face of the Institute and Magnus knew that her husband was considered an eccentric. Henry stretched the definition of eccentric in all the directions that it could be stretched. Magnus found himself liking the man more than most of his kind.

But Magnus was the type of person who should not be relied upon to be the most rational member of a friendship. He preferred to be the one prone to bad decisions while Catarina or Ragnor pulled him back from the worst ones. Now he’d gone and befriended a pair of Shadowhunters who were both impulsive idiots. Henry and Will were very different brands of idiots but there was a similarity in the level of their stupidity.

Henry was brilliant. Maybe every brilliant person was some sort of stupid too. The two things shouldn’t have gone so well together and yet, Magnus spent days and days staring at the portal and the plans and coming to the conclusion that it was both.

Brilliant or not, in the end, there was nothing to be done.

The portal had pulled through all the metal pieces that it had latched onto. They could reactivate and Magnus could add spell work to stabilize the power of the pull. He could help Henry make it safe enough to use. It was a marvel and Magnus was thrilled to have a chance to work on magic like that. But they had no way of opening the portal on the same location where Will and his friends were. For all their successes, they couldn’t solve the problem at hand.

“I thought there was magic that could track people’s locations,” Cecily had said as they stood around in a loose circle and Magnus and Henry traded off the explanation of why they couldn’t just go and get the others.

“We’ve tried,” Charlotte said.

Magnus nodded. “I’ve tried as well. It isn’t a barrier against just Nephilim magic-” Charlotte made a soft offended sound but Magnus ignored it. Their magic was different but their insistence on refusing to call it what it is was silly. He corrected the sentence to: “We can’t use Shadowhunter magic,” and Charlotte huffed again. Magnus blinked at her as though he didn’t understand. Henry started to step in to explain and Magnus pushed through what he was saying. Henry Branwell could get lost on a tangent like no one he had ever met.

“My magic is equally useless. It is like trying to use a compass in the presence of a magnet. There is something preventing an accurate reading. They might be north of us. There is a lot of distance between us and them. That is the most accurate reading I can get from any spell I know. A long way and maybe north. Maybe.”

Cecily had stormed out of the room after that.

Cecily was too much like her brother for her own good. She had his strong emotions and spun from one extreme to another. She blamed herself for her brother’s disappearance and would not hear reason or logic from anyone. She had shown up on Magnus’s doorstop seeking explanations and offering ideas. He had sent her away disappointed over and over again. None of the plans worked. Maybe if they were within fifty miles of the source of the disturbance, they might be able to use one of her schemes to use multiple tracking spells at different places to find the center. But they had no way to get that close and to just go off into the distance to try and activate tracking spells across the planet was untenable.

Charlotte had reported the disappearance but not the details. She was concerned that Henry’s portal design would be deemed illegal and dangerous and with all the other concerns over her fitness to continue as Institute Head, that was not something they would risk. She did not want any reason for the Consul to doubt either her or Henry. It was technically illegal to submit an incomplete report and Magnus was certain that Charlotte’s father would be rolling in his grave over this one.

Axel Mortmain had been quiet but nobody believed he was gone. It was obvious that all the Shadowhunters were waiting for the other shoe to drop. Henry’s plan had been to open a portal into one of Mortmain’s factories and if that had worked, they had delivered Tessa to his front door. The fear that Mortmain now had Tessa and was moving forward with whatever his plan was haunting them all.  

“If that had happened, don’t you think he would have done something by now?” Charlotte said when it was brought up. “His plot was to destroy the Shadowhunters, he hasn’t attempted that yet.”

Both she and Henry kept glancing down the table as though expecting other input. Jessamine was gone. Will and Jem were gone. There was no one to throw out other ideas or debate her reasoning. Henry wasn’t the greatest tactical thinker and Cecily knew so little of what was going on that she couldn’t yet give informed opinions. Sitting with the Shadowhunters made Magnus tense. An angry fifteen-year-old and Henry who was staring at the wall and thinking deeply about something else. Cecily let her emotions leak out like an oil spill that was always an inch away from bursting into flame. Charlotte kept everything tightly bottled up. They were a strange pair, equally intense but in very different ways.

“It’s just a puzzle, we’ll figure it out and bring them home,” Magnus said because no one else at the table was capable of being even vaguely reassuring.

“Not all of them,” Charlotte said.

After the first week, that hung over them all. The rationalizing and debating gave them hope for the first few days. He’d been healthy. He had probably had a dose that morning. He could make it a few days without the drug. But after that. Hope wore thin and then finally snapped. If they succeeded in any of their schemes, there was no possibility that they could bring James Carstairs home with the other two.

Magnus tried very hard not to notice anyone else’s grief over that realization. He left the Institute on an invented errand the day he found Charlotte sitting at her desk with a violin on her lap. She had just been staring at it, her expression carefully neutral.

They were doing everything they could. Charlotte had Shadowhunters working to search the British Isles but they hadn’t turned up anything yet. Magnus was convinced they were farther away than Ireland. Each time he did the tracking spell, the sense of distance remained strong. It was the only piece of the puzzle that he was absolutely sure of.

He did the tracking spell periodically. More than periodically. He didn’t like to admit how often he recast the spell. He did it in his spare time when he was supposed to be relaxing and enjoying his time away from the Shadowhunters. 

He sat in front of the fire in Woolsey’s sitting room and flipped Will’s empty billfold back and forth between his fingers. It had become a bad habit. Like poking at a healing wound. He held it so that the fire light reflected off the surface. It was a plain thing just a piece of metal. Magnus would have expected more flash from someone like Will, even just an engraving. It was a little scuffed but otherwise unremarkable.

The spell coiled in his mind and he resisted casting it. Bad habit. He should just let it lie. Let the boy be a Shadowhunter problem. They might succeed in finding him or they might not. It wasn’t Magnus’s problem. This was just a job. Unless Charlotte was going to pay him to sit at home and do extra spell work then it wasn’t his problem.

It wasn’t.

Except it was.

If you saved a life, you were responsible for it.

Magnus should have taken the warning in that proverb more seriously. He did not want to feel responsible for mortal lives. He certainly did not want to feel responsible for Shadowhunter lives. His thoughts were full of Will asking to be sent to the demon realms because he was in love with a girl and thought that was the only important thing in the world. Stupid boy. Magnus rubbed the bridge of his nose.

He cast the spell.

After all, bad habits were hard to break.

For the first time, the spell expanded and caught. It caught on something. Somewhere out there, the magic had found William Herondale. Magnus lurched out of the arm chair before the magic had resolved into a location. He grabbed his coat and headed for the door and the Institute.

He knew where they were.


	46. Stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whose been waiting on a Wessa chapter?

The light was fading and the stars were bright above them. Will leaned against door frame and looked up at them. He'd closed the door into the kitchen so that cold air couldn't get into where Tessa was sorting their supplies to make them easier to carry without the sled. Jem had retreated upstairs to rest with threats that they not fuss over him or worry about it. Will was trying hard to honour that.

Luckily, there were enough other thoughts to tear at his thoughts that it was easy to push that one aside. Will had kissed Jem in the middle of a field that afternoon. He had kissed him while Tessa was standing right there and no one had said a word about it since. Tessa had kissed him on the cheek and walked away like it had been just a conversation about the weather. She and Jem had whispered about it as they walked through the snow and Will still couldn’t make sense of her reaction.

Will kept turning the moment over and over in his head. Jem had been right, he had been waiting for the other shoe to drop and hadn’t truly believed that the were safe until the faeries disappeared and the storm was behind them. Even now, he was still on edge. The possibility that something might still go wrong was tearing at his imagination. That wasn’t anything new but it was stronger now.

When he fell into his darkest thoughts, it felt like he was always about to round the corner onto some new tragedy or set back. He couldn’t shake the thoughts once they started crawling around inside his head. There was always another tragedy waiting. The demon was gone but his sister was dead by morning. He had made it to London but the Nephilim weren’t as hateful as his mother had led him to believe and it was going to be far harder to make them hate him than he had expected. The curse was gone but Tessa had already made choices that left no space for him to make amends or make it better. Hell, they’d come back from solving the problem of Benedict Lightwood to find his little sister on their front step. Over and over, there was always something else waiting to go wrong.

They had made it out of the storm but what would come next?

He tilted his head back and looked at the stars. He had forgotten that he missed stars while he was in London. For the first few months, the clouds and the lights and the fog that had obscured the stars made him hate the city. Then he’d gotten used to it. He had learned to turn that hate in other directions. He had learned to hate everything in the right ways to make sure that everyone hated him back.

He missed the stars.

He missed being the kind of little boy who would lie in the grass and watch the stars until his mother came to fetch him from the dark and put him to bed.

He missed the security of knowing that someone would always come and find him and he would always have somewhere safe to return to.

Behind him, a door creaked.

“I was starting to worry about you,” Tessa said.

Will didn’t turn to look at her. He was still watching the sky. She came to stand beside him and his resolve cracked. He let himself have a glance. She had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl and she pulled it close and came to stand beside him in the door and look up. Her hair was almost entirely dry now and the end of her braid was curled tightly where it lay over her shoulder. She looked less like the London lady he expected and more like a peasant girl from a story. A beautiful girl who would be picked out from all the others for some adventure.

“I didn’t know that they could be so bright,” she said.

“I missed the stars while I was in London,” he said.

“When I was crossing the ocean, that was the first time I’d ever seen stars like this. So many little points of light. More than you could count if you spent a lifetime working on it. Out over the black water of the Atlantic, the sky looked like it went on forever. If you could go straight up, how far do you think you could go?” she asked.

“If you ever figure out how to go straight up, do tell me how, it sounds like an adventure,” Will said.

They stood in silence for a little while, both looking at the sky. Will felt Tessa’s attention on him and finally turned to look at her. Soft and careful. She was watching him like he was going to panic and bolt. He was thinking about. He forced a smile.

“Were you eavesdropping on us on the walk?” Tessa asked.

“There were no eaves involved,” Will said.

“I’m taking that to mean yes.”

“I wasn’t listening intentionally.”

Tessa nodded and they both looked out at the sky.

She started to talk in a voice that was barely a whisper, “I think it was the night of De Quincey’s party when you held my hand and called me Tess and told me that you would turn the entire plan around if I asked you to. Maybe it was when you grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the room in the Dark Sister’s house. You did it like it was a forgone conclusion that you could save me. I’d given up on there being anyone who would even try.”

“And yet, you attempted to beat me to death with a water jug,” he said.

“If no one is coming to save you, then the only course of action available is to save yourself,” she said.

Will smiled at that and the silence stretched between them.

“I love you, William Herondale,” she said. “I am engaged to be married to a man I love more than my own life but that hasn’t made me love you any less. I had hoped that it would. That loving Jem as much as I do would stop me from loving you the way that I do but it hasn’t worked that way. I love you more now than I did a week ago. I know that I will love you more still tomorrow though I can’t imagine how that is possible.”

Will closed his eyes. The word love was echoing around in his head. This conversation was not going where he had expected. That Jem was full of mad ideas was one thing. That Tessa was willing to make sacrifices that might make Jem happy wasn’t so surprising. Tessa using the word love was not expected. Care or friends, that was expected. He had let himself imagine that much. He had given himself that much space to fantasize and imagine.

That was as far as he had let his imagination go. At least she didn’t hate him.

But that isn’t what she had said.

She had said, “I love you.”

She had kissed him. She had cared enough about him that he had been able to break her heart. He had imagined that it was possible to convince her to give him a chance to win her affections. But then, she had made it very clear that she did not love him and could not love him. That she had kissed him when Jem was dying and she was too emotional to think straight didn’t change that. He had cut off this possibility at every pass. This wasn’t a possibility.

She had said, “I love you.”

She said it again when he let the silence go on too long, “I love you, Will.”

“I don’t deserve that. I am not the sort of person who deserves that,” he said. 

“You are exactly the type of person who deserves that,” Tessa said. “Jem’s right, you’re very easy to fall in love with and no amount of trying to explain my way out of it, to ignore it or wish it away has changed that.”

Will just nodded.

“I can’t imagine having a place that I call home that doesn’t have Jem in it,” Tessa said. “He is home for me.”

Will’s lips pulled into a sad smile but he held his silence. Jem had been the closest thing he had to a home for so long that he was a little shocked to hear someone else say the same thing.

“I also can’t imagine a life that doesn’t have you in it. I want you to laugh at me in the morning and fall asleep on Jem’s shoulder while he gives you that look. Does he give you that look when you’re paying attention or only when you’re not? He looks at you like he’s never seen anything quite so endearing before. Like you’re sweet and infuriating and he loves you more than anything else.”

Will turned himself to look at her. He pressed his spine against the door frame and held her gaze. Her expression was careful but serious. She was beautiful in the moonlight. It was so bright out that he could see her plainly. The curve of her cheek, the curl of hair below her ear that had escaped from the braid, her lips pressed together.

“And in what respectable life is any of that a possibility?” Will asked.

Will watched her. Her blanket was pulled tight and her expression was calm. He didn’t feel calm and reasonable and the entire topic of conversation made him feel like the ground was tilting beneath his feet. To lose something that was as impossible as the sun winking out wasn’t so bad. It hurt but it was meant to. To have her offer it and take it back would be worse. It was better to leave it in the realm of impossibilities. In some other world where rabbits talked and the trees grew gold coins, she might love him. In this world. It was impossible.

“None,” she said.

“But I am at best a warlock and at worst, some sort of unidentifiable halfbreed creature that no one has ever seen before,” she said.

Will started to interrupt her but she reached out and put a hand on his chest. She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t particularly matter what I am right this instant. I want to know, I want to understand it but right now all that matters is that there will always be those in the Clave who see me as some sort of monster,” she said.

“You aren’t-” Will said.

“I have a point to make. Be quiet,” she said.

Will laughed before he bit his lip and nodded.

“There are some people who will never see Jem as anything but a drug addict. The kinder ones will call him a former addict. They’re not any better than the ones who will hate me for my magic regardless of my character,” Tessa said.

“And I’ve made a good show of being half mad and a general disgrace in all things for years now,” Will said.

“What chance do any of us have at a respectable life?” Tessa said. “And if the game is stacked against you, if everyone has already decided that you can’t win, then where is the honour in playing? I’m not suggesting we court scandal and make a show. I’m just suggesting that maybe it would be possible to be happy. I don’t know that I care whether Benedict Lightwood and his friends think I am respectable or not. Who chooses the terms of respectable?”

“Usually I just ask Jem what he would do and let his decisions be the ones that guide my choices,” Will said.

Tessa laughed. “That’s your benchmark for goodness? What would Jem do at a moment like this?”

“It is,” Will said. He let out a breath and let the last of his reservations go with it. He said, “And Jem would do this.”

Then he caught her face between his hands and leaned down to kiss her very carefully. This time there was no recoil, no tears, no shock or surprise. He had kissed her before but never like this. He had kissed her while they were both drunk. He had kissed her while he was dripping with holy water and still not entirely in his right mind. He had kissed her when she wasn’t expecting it. He had kissed her when she didn’t want him to.

He had never kissed her like this.

This time she leaned up into it. She kissed him back, soft and slow. When he backed her up into the wall, she stretched her arms up to wrap them around him and pull him in closer. She kissed him harder and pulled him against her body. Her mouth opened and he took the invitation to deepen the kiss. Her fingers in his hair made him shiver and that shiver made her pull him in close and kiss her way down his jaw.

Tessa melted into him and he let his hands wander. Her hair was soft and her skin was warm in spite of the winter cold around them. She pressed back into his hand when he ran it down her body. He slipped it up under her shirt and she jumped at the cold as he curled it around the small of her back and pulled her in tighter. 

“I do,” he said against her mouth.

“Do?”

“Love you. I love you.”

“I love you too,” Tessa said and then she kissed him again. Her hand was twisted in his shirt to hold him close as she ran her fingers through his hair and played with the curls. She touched him as much as he was touching her and was a promise of home. The stars were still shining down on them and Will stopped worrying about the possibility of something bad on the horizon and let himself just be here with her, at the start of something wonderful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I one hundred percent believe that it is canon that Will has asked himself "What would Jem do?" in some situation or another and let that be his guide on how he would behave.


	47. The Worst Morning

 

Jem woke up to Will curled around him. An arm across his waist, Will’s head on his shoulder, his breath against his neck. Jem tested his limbs to find that his body didn’t hurt. The tiredness from the day before had faded. He knew that he wasn’t at a hundred percent but his body had healed as it was supposed to. He had slept and rested and he felt better. He stretched and Will pulled him in a little closer.

“Good morning,” Jem said.

Will muttered something and just nuzzled in closer.

“He’s cuddly this morning,” Tessa said.

Jem had to look past Will to see her sitting up on her elbows and watching. Her expression was a little bleary. She was still half asleep but she smiled when he made eye contact. There was warmth in the sunlight that came streaming through the window. It felt like summer was a possibility again. 

“I think he’s only pretending not to be awake,” Jem said.

“Let him sleep,” Tessa said.

She rubbed Will’s back then leaned over him to push Jem’s hair back from his face. Jem closed his eyes and said, “I could stay here a little longer.”

They lay curled up together in silence for a long time before Jem looked back up at her. She was tracing patterns on Will’s shoulder with her eyes shut.

“You managed to talk him into bed again,” Jem said.

“He didn’t argue very much,” she said.

“He argued with me,” Jem said.

“I think he thought I didn’t like him very much.”

“You do, don’t you?” Jem said. “This isn’t just some idea that I’ve pushed you into agreeing to.”

Tessa shook her head at him. “I love him. Sometimes I love him against my better judgment. He hasn’t always been the most gentlemanly person I know. He’s a better person than he gives himself credit for. I don’t want him to be anywhere else.”

Jem gently rolled Will over so that he could pull away from him. Will made a soft sound of protest but let Jem move away. Jem just needed to be free enough to pull Tessa in for a kiss. He reached over Will and she let herself be tugged in close. She laughed and kissed him back.

“I’m terribly jealous,” Will mumbled.

He lay between them, still tangled up with Jem’s knees. Tessa was halfway sitting up to lean over him and Jem had met her in the middle. He pulled back from her to look down at Will who gave him a sleepy smile.

“You’ll live,” Jem said. He kissed Tessa again which made Will retaliate. Will caught him around the waist and rolled them both over so that Jem was pulled away from Tessa and Will could lay him flat against the mattress. Tessa just laughed.

Will stretched out on top of him and Jem settled into it. The old mattress was lumpy and uncomfortable but he didn’t care. Will took up all his attention. He pulled Will’s shirt up so he could run his hand up Will’s bare skin. Jem had no interest in getting distracted by wrestling or bad jokes. Will watched him with a smile and didn’t try and tickle or tease.

There were scars up and down Will’s back, some of them had been there for a long time. There was a long slash from one of their first battles after they’d become parabatai. That one was easy enough to find by memory and touch. Most of the others were from the automaton that had exploded. They had healed well but they still left ridges and bumps that Jem could feel beneath his fingers.

Will was as fascinated by Jem’s exploration as Jem was. He lay propped up on his elbows and smiled down at him without moving. Jem glanced over at Tessa to see her watching with a soft expression. He cast out a hand to run it down her arm and squeeze her fingers before his attention fell back on Will.

“Why did we stop doing this?” Jem asked.

“Something something, improper, something something,” Will said.

“It was a terrible idea.”

“I think I told you that at the time.”

“At the time, I was fifteen and dying.”

“And now your much wiser and older.”

“And dying at a significantly slower pace,” Jem said.

“You aren’t dying,” Tessa told him.

“In the broadest sense of the universe, we’re all dying. There is a significant difference between measuring the pace at which you are dying in decades and measuring it months. I’m rather fond of having decades. I’m starting to get used to it,” he said.

She sighed at him.

He laughed. “I’ve got a lot of years left and I want to spend them here.”

“Right here?” Will asked. “Not that I’m complaining, I just feel like that will impeded a lot of other parts of living a life. There are a number of interesting things that can be done while flat on one’s back but it does make dancing, fighting, even reading rather difficult.”

Tessa snorted out a laugh.

“Stop talking, William,” Jem said and reached up to wrap his arms around Will’s neck and pull him in for a kiss.

This was an indulgence he had rarely allowed himself to so much as imagine. Stolen kisses were one thing, to pull Will in close and let the rest of the world fall away was something different. Even before Jem had started to try to put the proper distance back between them, they’d never really had kisses like this without hesitation or glances at the door.

Will was warm and close and his walls were down. There were no caustic jokes or harsh smiles. Will pressed back into the kiss. His hands wandered and he was so slow and deliberate about it that Jem was falling apart. Jem was not good at going slow. His best intentions got away from him. Too fast, too much. The soft comfortable kisses of romantic poetry always got lost in the need to be closer than he was. He tried to keep that impulse at bay.

He wanted this to last.

Will’s hands had made it up under his shirt to run up and down his chest. Will’s hips were pressed in close and Jem tried to readjust his knees so they would fit together better. Will dropped down to kiss Jem’s jaw and then his neck and he tilted his head back and let Will do what he wanted.

He caught sight of Tessa as Will nudged his head to the side. She was close enough to reach out and touch but separate enough that he had to try. He reached out to run his fingers down her cheek. Her eyes were wide and a little unreadable. Her cheeks were pink and she bit her lip and looked away when she caught him looking.

There were things he might have said but Will’s hand was sliding up his back and teeth grazed along his throat and Jem forgot how to talk. His eyes fell shut and he let himself collapse back into the moment with Will. Each time he pressed into it too hard, Will slowed him down again.

When he surfaced again, she had slipped out of bed and given them some privacy. The bedroom door was closed behind her and he didn’t remember hearing her leave. He frowned at the space where she had been and Will followed his gaze.

“Is she upset?” Will asked in an unclear voice.

Jem kissed him again before processing what he had said. He had to pull back from the kiss to answer, “I couldn’t tell. I didn’t think so. But then she left.”

“Perhaps we were being a little selfish?”

“I assume you spent most of last night kissing her and that’s how she convinced you not to take the other room. This isn’t any more selfish than that,” Jem said.

He still felt too warm and a little too hazy to be talking. He nuzzled Will’s ear and groped around until he found Will’s skin to stroke again. Will leaned into the touch like a cat.

“It was a purely practical conversation involving the limited number of blankets the owners of this fine establishment left behind them,” Will said.

“Really? I’d have kissed her if she gave me any sort of invitation.”

“Yeah, that happened too,” Will admitted.

Jem laughed again and buried it against Will’s neck. “We should get up now or I will just keep you here all day.”

“Was that a threat or a promise?”

“Yes,” Jem said. “But get up because one of us needs to have some self control and I don’t think it’s me.”

“We’re doomed. When I ever been known for self control or responsible decisions?” Will said.

Jem wasn’t sure who started it but they were kissing again. Jem lost another long stretch of time to Will’s hands and his mouth and the little laugh he had when he liked something. It was silly to have spent so long not doing this when they could have.

“Breakfast, Tessa,” he finally muttered against the bit of Will’s chest he’d been able to reach after failing to fumble open a third button.

“Both of those things are appealing and I think we should just bring both of them back to bed and pick up right about here,” Will said.

Jem gave him a gentle shove and they untangled themselves from the bed. They were not presentable. Will made rumbled look like an art form but Jem suspected the same messy hair and imperfectly buttoned clothes just made him look like a scarecrow.

Will pulled a wool jumper on over the clothes he had worn to bed and didn’t bother to tie his boots up before he went downstairs. Jem made a small attempt at looking like he hadn’t been on a brink of utter debauchery before he followed. His hair wouldn’t lie flat and he hadn’t gotten the buttons on his shirt right but he didn’t notice until he caught his reflection in a mirror hanging by the front door.

He looked like a stranger. Pink cheeks and bright eyes and his hair too long and too dark and sticking up at all angles. He paused and stared back at the face that wasn’t quite his. He had even started to put on weight without the drug dragging his health down. His cheeks were a different shape and his mouth was flushed from everything he’d been doing with Will.

In the kitchen, Tessa laughed.

Will was wrapped around her from behind as she stood stirring at the stove. His arms were looped around her waist and his chin was on her shoulder. Whatever she was cooking smelled sweet and syrupy and Jem was hungrier than he had expected.

“Come back to bed,” Will said.

“I found rolled oats in the pantry,” she said.

“Sounds healthy but not nearly as entertaining as coming back to bed.”

“I’m going to eat the porridge and this miserable excuse for peach compote then we’re leaving. We can curl up in bed together when we get someplace that isn’t so cold,” Tessa said.

Will sighed heavily and she laughed at him again.

Jem sat down on the bench nearest to them and Will glanced over at him. Jem pressed his back against the edge of the table. He wanted to get up and kiss Will again. Tessa was right but heading out on the road again wasn’t what he wanted to do either. Will still looked soft and rumpled.

“Tell her,” Will said.

“She’s right.”

“No, wrong,” Will said. “Didn’t you just tell me that you had no self control and wanted to spend the entire day in bed?”

“We’re going to run out of food if we don’t get back to civilization where the farmland isn’t dead,” Jem said.

“Can I negotiate for going back to bed until noon?” Will asked.

“We probably can’t make the inn by nightfall if we wait until noon to leave. I don’t want to find out if there are wolves in those woods,” Tessa said.

“This is the worst morning ever,” Will said.

“Liar,” she accused.

Will sighed. He knew it was a losing argument and he was starting to sober up or wake up or otherwise come back out of the hazy comfort of spending a long time wrapped up in someone else. He didn’t let go of Tessa but he nodded.

“Did you leave because we were making you uncomfortable?” Jem asked.

“I just thought that maybe you’d like some privacy,” Tessa said without looking at him. She was staring down at the pot in front of her, stirring it slowly so nothing burned. She pressed her shoulders back against Will’s chest a little bit but still didn’t look up.

“So very uncomfortable then,” Will said.

“I wasn’t. It’s not,” she trailed off. She gestured with the spoon as though it meant something.

“Tess?”

“I don’t object to you two… doing that. It’s only. I mean. I have been kissed but I have never seen anyone do it before,” she said. “It just felt like the kind of thing that you’re not supposed to watch.”

“Ah,” Will said.

Tessa started to squirm away from him and the tone he had used. Jem raised his eyebrows and Will leaned into her ear before he let her go. “And you liked watching, didn’t you?”

“I know it’s hard for you but try not to be vulgar,” Tessa said.

Will laughed again. He hadn’t stopped smiling and Jem watched him as he teased Tessa and she argued back. They were deep in each other’s personal space. Even when Will released her to retreat from her mocking him for saying something silly, she stepped back in close to put her hand on his chest and tap him on the nose as she talked. Will watched her like she had hung the stars in the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title is a joke for jtkos and themimsyborogrove and wingsofnike who all yelled at me in various ways for the chapter I called "A Last Good Morning" so here, have an actually good morning. 
> 
> See, I told you I'd stop bringing you cactuses. 
> 
> Also, yes, really, the angst part is over. There's some mild sorting themselves out stuff to happen between now and the final scene (like Tessa getting awkward and leaving here and Jem's morbid sense of humour) but it's all in the context of fluffy fluffy fluff. I promise.


	48. Traveling

They made it to the inn before the next night and Tessa changed into one of the miners in order to book them a room. She had complained about having to change into men’s clothing behind a barn on the road and Will and Jem had just stood around the corner and laughed at her. Will was there at her side as she negotiated with the proprietor so he could use a persuasion rune to gloss over their lack of money and her in ability to speak the language.

“I feel dishonest for not paying,” Tessa said later when they sat in the common room and waited for their meal.

 She was still wearing the unfamiliar body. She had chosen a miner who would pass for about the same age as Will and Jem. Three boys who were lost on their travels was as good a story as any. It felt like a very long time since she had been in a room full of people and that wasn’t helping her feel more comfortable. It was not a busy inn but it was busier than the abandoned places they had been staying.

“I have just decided that I don’t care about being dishonest,” Will said.

The food arrived, a beef stew with vegetables, some fruit preserve and a bowl of pureed potatoes. Tessa wasn’t going to blithely declare it but she didn’t really care about being dishonest either if it meant that they were being properly fed. She hadn’t felt hungry but she had missed real good food.

They ate and sat with the small crowd for a little while before finally retreating to a too small room and falling asleep in their clothes on the narrow dormitory style beds. Tessa hadn’t fallen asleep alone in a long time and woke up twice in the night to sit up and look for Will or Jem. Each time she found them sleeping in the next bed over, she was able to doze off again.

The next day dawned warm. They had made it far enough away from the magic of the storm and summer was returning. The trees here were green and the fields were tended farms broken by thick stretches of forest. The little village around the inn wasn’t much more than a feed store and a single room school. Tessa looked out the inn’s window at the world beyond and smiled as a pair of children walked by. It was small but it was just a town, a place where people could live happy lives. 

Will was on his second plate of breakfast and Jem was stealing pieces of it as they talked about where they would go next. Tessa watched them as much as she watched the road beyond. She finished her cup of tea and got up enough courage to go and try and ask for the inn owner for advice. She had to dig through the memories of the change for single words.

“You’d best head to the coast. The railroad hasn’t made it this far north yet, boys,” the inn’s owner explained to them the next morning when they asked about the nearest stations. Tessa struggled immensely with pulling words out of the memories of the change but the owner had already decided they were foreigners and tolerated her pointing and single words.

“Coast?” Tessa repeated, ruining the word with her accent.

“To catch a boat. There’s a logging town there, you should be able to get passage back to the city from there,” he said. “It’s amazing you got so far into the country. How did you manage to get this far inland with such bad Finnish?”

Tessa had to just shrug and the inn owner laughed at her and clapped her on the shoulder. She wobbled a little in surprise. Why did men do that to each other? She was looking forward to going back to wearing her own body once they were out of sight of the town.

They had regular roads to walk now and they headed in the direction that the inn owner had pointed them down. Tessa dodged away before he could happily hit her in the shoulder again and he did it to Will instead. The day was warm and they carried less than they had before. The winter clothes were left abandoned in a barn for the farmer to find and do what they wanted with.

Tessa changed back into herself as soon as they were out of sight of the last building. She stretched and ran her fingers through her hair before pulling it back and twisting it together into a loose bun to keep it from tangling. Will smiled at her.

“Do you want to stop to change?”

“No, this is fine for walking. I’ll just have to change again if we meet someone else, it will be easier if I’m already properly dressed,” she said.

Jem was up ahead of them. He had been experimenting with his body more and more as they went. He was more confident with each step. As Tessa watched him, he made the jump up onto a fence post and had to fling his arms out to catch his balance. He wobbled but didn’t fall. He started to walk along the rails between the posts. Each rail was a piece of wood about as wide as Tessa’s arm.

He was fine when he went slow but he tried to pick up speed and had to jump clear to keep from crashing to the ground. He glared at the post for a minute and then hopped back up again. Over and over.

“You’ve got the balance of a drunken rabbit,” Will told him.

Jem shot back an insult in Chinese.

“That too,” Will said.

“A week ago, he couldn’t make it across a flat floor,” Tessa said softly.

“Don’t be nice to him, he’ll get superior,” Will said.

“I was a better Shadowhunter than you when I was sick, I will be far superior before the end of the week at this rate,” Jem said with a laugh.

That started a ridiculous argument about nothing that led to a shoving match in the middle of the road while they both laughed like mad men. Tessa stopped and climbed up on the edge of a fence to eat an apple they had stolen off a tree near the road about a mile back.

Will took an elbow to the side and escalated the entire fight by pulling Jem down to the ground in the grass by the edge of the road. It was late summer and the grass was high. Tessa lost sight of them almost as soon as they hit the ground but they were still laughing and calling each other names as the grass waved back and forth above them.

“Are you two alright?” she called when the noise died down.

Will popped back up out of the grass first and held out a hand for Jem. Jem had leaves in his hair and was still laughing. He leaned into Will and set his forehead on Will’s shoulder while Will brushed the leaves out.

“You two are children,” Tessa said.

“I want an apple,” Will said.

“You could at least ask nicely, you’re not a feral child no matter how much you might look like one now,” she said.

She hopped down off the fence and came over to finish brushing bits of nature off them both.

“Please miss, may I have some more?”

“Really? Oliver Twist?” Tessa said.

“Also I haven’t had any so I can’t very well ask for more can I? You should share,” Will said reaching out to snatch the apple from her hand. She let him do it. He was in a gloriously good mood and it was thrilling just to watch him be that happy. Jem was still draped over his shoulder and they both smelled like fresh grass.

“Let’s just stop for lunch before you two hurt each other,” Tessa said.

They laid a blanket out and ate the apples and some bread and cheese from the town. Tessa lay back with her head on Jem’s lap and stared up at the sky after she had finished eating. The sky was bright and blue and dotted with clouds. Jem was looking down at her and she returned his smile.

She could remember his silver eyes - could remember them vividly - but she no longer had to remind herself that this was her Jem. The dark brown of his eyes was flecked with stray bits of silver that hadn’t been pulled out by the faeries. Like the stray strands in his hair, the little reminders of the yin fen didn’t seem to be fading. He had always been beautiful but before there had been a fragility to him, now he was vibrantly beautiful.

Will flopped sideways and stretched out so that his head rested on her stomach. Tessa ran her fingers idly through his hair and closed her eyes. She had expected walking across half a country to be exhausting and tedious but each moment like this made her want to stretch the trip out. There would be time for London and Mortmain and the rest of life’s problems later.

“Did you ever play that game as children?” Jem asked. “The one where you look at the shapes in the clouds?”

“Yes, my sisters refused to believe me when I told them there were dragons in the sky,” Will said.

“There’s not much chance for lying on the ground in the New York tenements. Nate wasn’t much for that kind of imagining and my aunt was too busy to play games like that,” Tessa said.

“You’re familiar with the rules?” Will said.

“Are there rules?” Jem asked.

“Yes. The rules are that I am always right and it isn’t a dog, it’s a dragon,” Will said. He took Tessa’s hand and guided it so that he was holding it in his palm and pointing at a bit of cloud that looked like nothing. “That one? Dragon.”

Tessa laughed. “Maybe a cabbage.”

“No, no, you can’t be that unimaginative. I’ve invested a lot of time and emotion into falling in love with you and I will be vexed if I have to break off this thing because you see sky cabbages instead of dragons,” Will said.

Tessa swatted him in the head and he grabbed both her hands and held them between his. She didn’t fight him and he kissed her fingers.

“You’re cute but it doesn’t look like a dragon,” she said.

“It doesn’t,” Jem agreed.

“That bit is the horns and that bit is the nose, it’s just that it’s curled up. Probably on a big pile of treasure or the corpse of Saint George.”

“Saint George won the battle,” Tessa said.

Will sighed. “Imagination, Gray. A little imagination.”

“Oh, I’ve got one, that one lower down by the trees looks like a horse,” Tessa said. Will turned to look and started to make a doubting noise so she added, “In honour of Will’s preference for the fantastical, I will amend that to unicorn.”

“I’ll give you unicorn,” Will said. “Sky unicorns are acceptable.”

They wasted more than an hour lying in the field and staring at the sky. Tessa felt warm and drowsy and when they finally dragged themselves up to continue on toward the next town, she didn’t want to move. Will took her hand as they set off down the road again and he told her amended story of Saint George and the dragon in which the dragon ate all the mundanes and had to be stopped by a team of Shadowhunters. He told it as a comedy and Tessa spent the whole story leaning into his shoulder and laughing. 


	49. A Hayloft

They didn't make it to the next town by nightfall and had to double back to a farmstead in search of someplace to sleep. The homesteads were spread out and Will didn’t think they’d find another before they had to sleep in the woods. Rather than try and find a way to negotiate their way into a room in the house, they just climbed up into the hayloft of the barn.

Will watched Tessa peer around the barn in curiosity. It was a large space with pens for animals taking up most of the lower floor. By the standards of an animal barn, it was well kept but it was still a barn full of sheep. It was hardly a charming place. Still she craned her neck and frowned at the animals and took in the tools hanging from the walls before Jem swung the door shut and plunged the space into darkness.

"Have you ever been in a barn before?" he asked.

"No. I've never even gone out to the carriage house behind the Institute," she said.

"Let's not wake any of the sheep or whatever else is sleeping in here, we need to find a ladder," he said.

Will had been inside barns before but his family had been landowners, not farmers. Their barn had been for horses and a little bit of equipment related to the horses. He had been in a hayloft before but never tried to sleep in one. It seemed like it should be idyllic and the sort of thing that made good fodder for poetry. The reality wasn’t living up to that expectation.

Tessa kept a hand on his arm so she could follow him through the dark without bumping into things. She moved gingerly but Will could feel her pause to consider sounds or things they moved past on their way towards the ladder on the far wall. She was still fascinated by the barn and it was adorable. Jem’s mood was clear in his body language. He was not fascinated. He was trying not to complain about the dark or the animal smell or the lack of a bed. 

It was the first time that Will had had them both alone since the abandoned farm house they'd found after leaving the storm behind. He didn't really care if it was in a dark space full of hay that smelled like cows.

Will helped pull Tessa up into the loft which wasn’t as full as it would be in winter. In summer, the animals could graze on the fields and keeping in hay wasn’t as necessary. There was a big pile of the stuff at the back that they could rearrange and spread blankets over and make into a bed.

It was also dark.

Will had a night vision rune but Tessa didn’t and she hadn’t let go of him. Jem was ahead of them. He didn’t like the night vision runes and claimed that they made him feel like he was losing his mind. He had Shadowhunter senses that were just a little bit better than Tessa’s and he could make out shapes thanks to the small amount of weak moonlight filtering in through an open door at the far side of the loft.

Will tugged his arm hard to the left and Tessa gasped and stumbled away from an imagined obstacle. Will used the moment to unbalance her and then scoop her up in his arms and hold her close to him. An arm around her back, one under her knees, holding her tight to his chest. She sucked in a gasp and tensed.

“What just happened?” she asked.

“Dangerous, frightening, very evil demon,” Will said but he couldn’t keep the laugh out of his voice. Tessa sighed and shoved him in the chest.

“Put me down,” she said.

“In a minute?” he suggested.

He kissed her temple and she laughed back at him and relaxed against his chest. He wasn’t mocking her. He just wanted the chance to hold onto her. It still felt impossible that she would laugh and lean in when he touched her. He wanted to spend days making her laugh. He kissed her again and this time she curled in and wrapped an arm around his neck to kiss him back.

“I am never sleeping in a barn again,” Jem said and Tessa pulled back from the kiss to look towards him. Will didn’t put her down.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“It’s a barn. It smells and it’s dirty and I want a real pillow,” Jem said. His urge to complain so rarely made it through his good manners that it even surprised Will to hear the edge in his voice.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you whine before,” Tessa said.

“It takes near death and weeks in the wilderness to make him whine,” Will said.

“Is it so wrong to be annoyed by the length of this walk and our lack of money? I want to be home,” Jem said.

“We’ll get there,” Tessa said.

She pulled away from Will and this time he let her go, setting her back on her feet and watching as she walked carefully across the space to Jem. She had a hand out and when it bumped into him, she pulled him into a hug. The tension in his shoulders vanished immediately. Will had to bite his tongue not to say something and ruin the little moment they were having. Jem wrapped himself around her and held on.

When he got close enough, Will settled against Jem’s back and wrapped his arms around Jem’s waist. Jem was so thin. In spite of the travel, he was getting healthier every day. He looked better but he still felt too thin when Will held him this close.

“If this is the reaction I get when I whine, maybe I should do it more often,” Jem said.

“I think a better solution is to just find quiet dark places where we can hide all the time,” Will said.

“Cleaner ones,” Jem said.

“Fine, if that will make you happy, cleaner places where we can be alone.”

“That sounds nice,” Tessa said.

Will had managed to maintain the basics of decorum on the road. He had done a pretty good job of keeping his hands to himself. Now that it was dark and quiet and Tessa had just run her fingers up into his hair to pull him closer for a kiss, he lost that decorum. They tucked their bags into the corner and spread a blanket out over the hay and Will kept his hands on someone else the entire time.

He let his hands linger on Tessa’s hips and Jem’s back. He brushed up against Jem when he tried to smooth down the blankets. Will used the excuse of being able to see to guide Tessa around and she leaned back into his touches. She trusted him. Tessa sat down on the blanket and frowned out at the dark around her, trying to make out the shapes. Will sat down beside her and put a finger on her cheek to turn her towards him. He kissed her. She gasped and he kissed her a little deeper but then she pulled back.

“Will?” she said.

“I apologize,” he started.

“You needn’t, I just wasn’t sure who you were for a moment and it was a bit disorienting,” she said. “Come back. Try again.”

Will did and she was smiling as his mouth brushed against hers. She laughed gently and then returned the kiss. Will pushed her down, one hand reaching for Jem to pull him in close. Jem let himself be brought in behind her. She settled in with her back against Jem’s chest and Will pressing himself against her body.

Will kissed across her cheek and down her neck and fumbled until he found Jem’s chin and then kissed him too.

There was a catch.

Will wasn’t sure that it was yet but there as a string tied to some piece of this and someone would pull on it sharply enough and it would come crashing down. He kissed Jem a little harder, he pulled Tessa in closer and then found her mouth and kissed her as hard as he had kissed Jem.

There was a catch and it would come eventually but even if he only had this one night, he would be happy. This was enough to sustain a lifetime. Jem was touching him. He wasn’t sure when it had started but Jem’s hand was sliding up under his shirt to run along his ribs. It brought the need to get his hands on Tessa’s body into sharp focus. He wanted to feel her skin. He wanted to explore every inch of her. He got as far as slipping his hands up under the man’s shirt she was wearing. The muscles in her stomach shuddered a little as his hand ran up to her rib cage. Her skin was warm and smooth and so soft. Will nuzzled her neck and ran his hands up to her breasts.

Then a dog started to bark.

Will swore softly.

Tessa laughed at him, burying her face in his shoulder. Will lay still and listened to the sound of people waking up in the house. Farmers took barking dogs seriously. Farm dogs barked at threats and slept through everything else. The dog might have been barking at a fox but they lay curled together and listened to someone talking outside the barn.

Tessa’s body shifted.

“What are you doing?” Jem asked.

“I want to know what the man is saying,” she said.

Will was still touching her and feeling her body shift under his hands was unsettling. She got smaller and sharper under his touch and he was left with a stranger tucked in close to his chest. She didn’t move. Her arm was still around his neck. Will knew that it was still Tessa but he’d never been so close to her as a change took her and he was too disoriented to think about anything else.

“He’s asking the dog if it was a fox,” she whispered.

Beside them, Jem relaxed. The dog hadn’t woken when they’d snuck onto the farmstead and it hadn’t barked when they’d walked into the barn. Will had thought that they had the good fortune to choose a farm that didn’t have a guard dog. The dog must have seen a squirrel in a tree or a fox in the distance.

The barn door creaked as it opened.

Will swore again.

The farmer didn’t climb up into the hayloft to look for travelers. He checked the stalls below and then scolded the dog and headed back to the house. Tessa laughed again. She sank back into her own body now that she didn’t need to understand or translate the whispered conversations between the man and the dog. Her body shifted under his hand again.

“Perhaps we need to be quieter,” she said.

“We were not being very loud,” Will said.

They had been speaking softly before the interruption but now they kept their voices at whispers. They were trespassers and it was better not to risk getting noticed.

They lay together and whispered but Will was too shy to start the kiss again. He wanted it. He stared at them in the dark as his night vision rune started to wane and thought about it but it felt like the moment had been broken. There would be another moment but this one was gone.

Jem dropped off to sleep first, his arm around Tessa’s waist and a little smile on his face. She leaned in to kiss Will on the cheek before cuddling in with her head on his shoulder and dozing off a few minutes later. Will was left to lie in the dark and smile at the ceiling until he fell asleep too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been the queen of procrastination on this story lately. It's so close to being done that my mind has decided that it is finished and therefore not a priority. 
> 
> So I did not do any research on sheep farming practices in Finland in the 1870s. I feel like people don't often keep sheep in barns because the flocks are too large? I also don't know how farm distribution worked. Please excuse the lack of historical research because if I went looking, I'd spend 3 hours reading about sheep husbandry and 0 hours writing and editing.


	50. A Hotel

Will pulled her along the hall and into a hotel room. It was better appointed than most of the places they had seen and far nicer than the barn they had slept in the night before. Tessa left the boys to write runes on the door so she could take a look around the room. It had plush carpets and thick blankets on the bed. Two chairs sat in front of a small fireplace. There was even art on the wall. She took off her filthy boots and left them by the door to walk out onto the carpet and get a closer look at the view from the window.

"Can you see the harbour from here?" Will asked.

"No, I think we're facing the wrong way and we aren't very high, I can't see much but the street," she said.

He came to join her. His hand settled at her waist as he leaned his shoulder against hers to look out at the street below. It was a small town. The hotel was the nicest building aside from the town hall. Below them, farm carts trundled by bearing the remains of a day at market. Across the street, a small tavern was starting to fill up with men off work and looking for entertainment.

They had found a river and followed it along until they found this place. There were boats on the river and Jem was certain they'd be able to catch one to the next largest town and then the next. Eventually they'd find someplace with seafaring ships that might be able to take them back to London. It was a good plan but a tedious one. Tessa was sick of walking. It wasn't that it was hard travel, the roads were well traveled enough that it was just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. The problem was that that was boring.

"Is it too much to hope that we're almost done with this trek?" Jem asked.

"Can't Shadowhunters run for miles without tiring?" Tessa asked.

"We're not running. We're trudging. Trudging is unpleasant," Jem said.

"You could always run on ahead and hire a carriage to come back for me," she said.

"I apologize, I didn't-" he started.

She cut him off, "I was teasing you. I'm tired of the walk too. Maybe we should stay for a day before we go on."

"Or hire a carriage," Will said.

"No, she's right, we should stay put. One day won't hurt us," Jem said.

He was smiling at her. Her attention strayed to Will and then away. He was frowning out the window, about to start talking about boat schedules or something equally important. Important but uninteresting. His hand lingered on her, his hands were always lingering on her these days, but his attention was still on the plans to get back to London. Jem's attention jumped between them.

"I'm going to go wash the dust and hay out of my hair," Tessa said.

She had been about to say something else but the nerve had left her at the last moment. The comment brought on a flurry of practicalities. Finding a way to get dinner when they weren't actually guests, gathering water, changing out of their traveling clothes. They had arrived in the late afternoon and by the time all of that was done, it was starting to get dark.

There was a fire in the grate and Tessa hadn't managed to get a chair to herself so she climbed up to sit on Jem's lap. He laughed and pulled her in so she could lean against his chest and rest her head on his shoulder. She let her feet hang over the arm of the chair. The night was warm enough without the flame but she appreciated the added heat. Her toes were warm in their socks and the rest of her was warm from being cuddled in against Jem's body. 

None of this was acceptable. Even if they had been married, sitting up on someone's lap and wrapping your arms around them like a child was not polite. Tessa wasn't sure what rules dictated for married couples alone in their own rooms but she couldn't imagine that this would considered proper. Her speech to Will about the losing battle of propriety lingered in her mind. Did she really believe all that? She looked across the small table to find him watching.

His hair fell to his collar in a ragged mass of curls. His eyes were bright and there was the faintest hint of a smile on his lips. He hadn't buttoned his collar all the way and she could see an edge of one of his runes on his chest. All the details of him fascinated her. They always had. Once she had felt a little like a mouse being fascinated by a snake. Will had made it very clear that he wasn't safe. He still looked a little bit dangerous. His expression wasn't quite as carefully controlled or as polite as it was supposed to be.

"Am I interrupting?" Will asked.

His tone was too even. Tessa started to sigh at him, to assemble the words to chastise him, but Jem interrupted her. He wasn't looking at her as he put a gentle hand under her chin and turned her toward him. Tessa's stomach slid sideways. Jem gave Will a little glare and then leaned in to kiss Tessa on the mouth. He didn't look away from Will until after their mouths had touched. Tessa kissed him back. It only took a moment before she forgot about everything else as he pulled her in and she twisted her body into his arms.

When Jem pulled away from her, she pulled him back in closer to kiss his cheek and his neck. It wasn't until he said something that she remembered that Will was sitting there, less than five feet away, watching it all happen. Tessa stopped what she was doing and turned her face into his shoulder. He held her and kept talking to Will. It took her another moment to push her embarrassment down enough to hear what they were talking about.

"I don't mind if you're watching."

"She does."

"No, I don't," Tessa said.

"You match the cushion," Will said.

The chair they were curled in was upholstered in a rich burgundy red. Tessa's cheeks were hot but she was very sure that they weren't that red. She sighed and drew herself up to sit straight or at least as straight as could be managed when she was draped across someone's knee. Will was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and a bemused expression on his face. The look was so carefully constructed that Tessa wanted to ask him if he had blueprints laid out somewhere to teach him how to make each expression.

"Don't look at me like that and be a cad about it," Tessa said.

"Look at you like what?" Will asked in that too neutral tone.

"Like you're calculating each twitch of your lip and each raised eyebrow," she said. Will's composure slipped and he looked genuinely worried that he had offended her. Before he could say something, she pushed out the rest of the words. "You'll have to excuse me if I'm not exactly well versed in all of this. This is all new. I don't know how to do this well or artfully."

"Tess," he interrupted her in a soft voice and she fell silent. She wasn't sure what she was trying to say anyways.

"Theresa Gray," Will said. He stood and crossed the space to them. She leaned back against Jem as Will braced his hands on the arms of the chair and leaned in closer. Maybe he was right. Maybe she was blushing as red as the chair. Jem held her with both arms looped around her waist and his cheek against the side of her head.

"You don't need to be anything other than what and who you are," Will said. He was closer now, his nose only inches from hers, his eyes soft and the dark blue of sapphires. He didn't look so collected and calculated. He looked worried and careful and human. Just a boy. She liked this Will so much better than the person he pretended to be. This Will was the one she had fallen in love with. She had only ever seen him in glimpses before this ordeal but that had been enough. He touched her cheek and said, "You're perfect."

"You are but he's not," Jem said nuzzling her hair and laughing. 

Before the joke could break the moment, Tessa caught Will's face in both her hands and pulled him in a little closer to her. "That's why I love you. I don't want you to be perfect. I want you to be you."

Will started to duck his head away from that and Tessa caught him and pulled him into kiss. He was smiling against her mouth and fumbled with where to put his hands as she sat on a chair in someone else's lap. The kiss didn't last as long as she wanted it to.

"Give Carstairs a break, come sit with me," he said.

"We could go get an extra chair," Tessa teased.

"No," Will said. "No, we shouldn't do that."

Jem didn’t really want to let her go yet but he didn’t stop her when Will took her hand and pulled her up. He walked backwards until he hit the other chair with the back of his knees and then sat down and pulled Tessa into his lap. She sat too straight with her knees on either side of his hips. Will’s hands started on her thighs and slid up under her shirt along the skin of her stomach.

She glanced back over her shoulder at Jem and he grinned at her. She returned it and then turned back to Will. Her composure was slipping in every direction and it left her unsure of what to do with her hands. They fluttered before settling on his shoulders and then fluttering away to rest on her own knees. His hands were calloused and gentle and had made it to her ribs.

“You’re so shy about this,” Will said. “You weren’t so shy in the barn. Is there something comforting about barns or alluring about cows?”

“I should slap you,” Tessa told him conversationally.

“You should kiss me, I promise that I can’t talk through a kiss. I will be perfectly silent,” Will said. She wasn’t sure what exactly her expression was but it made Will reach up to cup her face and say, “I love you and so does Jem. You’re not doing anything wrong.”

“I know.”

“And yet.”

“I just don’t want to do something to ruin it,” she said.

“There is nothing you could do to ruin this, nothing, I swear that to you,” he said.

His hands retreated from under her clothes and he reached up to cup her face and kiss her. Soft and slow and long. She let the tension go and leaned into him as his hands disappeared back up under her clothes. Jem watched them move together. As Tessa’s nerves calmed, Will got more confident. He held her closer, he laughed into her neck, he cast one happy look over her shoulder at Jem before pulling her in for another kiss.

“You’re making me jealous,” Jem said. Tessa pulled back and Jem touched her on the back. She hadn’t realized that he had gotten so close. He was right behind her. His voice was right beside her ear. The touch kept her from panicking and apologizing and getting up. She stayed frozen, her thoughts turning over and over around the word. Jealous. She tilted her head back to look at him. He didn’t look upset. He kissed her forehead and whispered, “We should go to bed.”

She was looking up at him as he stood behind her. She collected herself enough to close her mouth but she knew that she was still blushing and disheveled. Jem reached past her to run his fingers through Will’s hair. Will leaned his head back against the chair and watched with a content smile.

Will melted for Jem in way she couldn’t quite reconcile with anything she knew about them and their relationship. Will worried about behaving properly when she was involved but with Jem, he was immediately at ease. He wasn’t gentler. He was better. He found it easier to be a good person when Jem was there and Tessa liked watching that change come over Will.

“Oh. Yes. He’s definitely right, we should definitely go to bed,” Will said.

Will stood without letting go of Tessa and she yelped as he lifted her. She grabbed hold of his shoulders and he held her so that her knees were on either side of his waist. Jem had to step back but he didn’t go so far that he couldn’t touch her. Will held her easily and Jem’s hand still rested on her back.

“Stop picking me up like that,” she told Will.

“You’re cute when you’re startled. Do you really want me to put you down?” Will asked.

Jem leaned in so he was pressed against her back and set his chin on her shoulder. She glanced at him but couldn’t turn far enough to look him in the eye. She turned back to look at Will again who still looked soft and comfortable and confident. Tessa suddenly realized that she had never seen him this happy. He was grinning and soft.

“You’re a little flustered,” Jem said.

“Just a bit,” she said.

“Stay for a minute, I like this. He won’t drop you,” Jem said.

“I know,” she said.

He slipped his hand up the back of her shirt kissed her cheek. She shivered and shut her eyes. Will was laughing, happy and soft and unlike anything she had ever imagined from him. Tessa wrapped her arms around his shoulders and tightened her legs around him and he kissed her again. Jem stayed close and rubbed her back as she opened her mouth and kissed Will harder.

When that kiss broke, Jem stroked Will’s cheek until Will looked at him. Jem pressed in close to Tessa and kept one arm around her waist as he kissed Will. Her heart rate shifted. It did every time they were affectionate with each other.

“You mentioned bed,” Will said.

“I did,” Jem said.

“That might be better,” Tessa said.

Will finally put Tessa down as they stumbled over each other on the way to the bed. Tessa’s flustered shyness had been swept away and she was giggling and touching as much as they were by the time they got there.

This was exactly where she wanted to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had declared that this thing wouldn't have any smut in it because I thought it worked better at a comparable rating to the original novels. 
> 
> But. Then I wrote the Hayloft chapter and realized that I probably couldn't spin out cock-blocking the three of them through another 10 000 words. I mean I could, but it would be obnoxious and I don't want to do it. 
> 
> I am going to post the explicit chapter. So if you aren't into that, you can skip over Chapter 50 and come back for 51 without having missed any plot or characterization that you can't extrapolate from this chapter.


	51. Together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here, our rating need to jump up a few levels.

Will had planned to sit Tessa down when they got to the bed but Jem was so tangled up in it that he tumbled down onto the bed with her wrapped around him. He ended up on his back with her draped over him. She giggled and tucked her face in against his shoulder, shy again. She was the one who had convinced him to try it, to curl up in bed with them both and see what happened next. He remembered that conversation vividly. She had been calm and self assured then, but now, every touch made her shy.

Jem was just as kind and confident as he had been in everything else. He lay down on the bed beside them and stroked Tessa's cheek until she raised her head to look at him. He was so gentle with her and every time he touched her, she found her confidence again. Will held her carefully. He did not want to do anything that she didn't like. He wanted to make her smile the way she smiled at Jem.

They had some silent conversation that Will missed entirely and resented immediately but then Tessa turned her attention back to him. She ran her fingers down the side of his face and set two fingers under his jaw to turn his face towards hers. He did exactly as she asked and after a moment of just staring at him, she leaned in to kiss him. She kissed him harder than the last time and Will struggled to match it. A hard press of lips and a graze of teeth on his lower lip that made him open his mouth and lean in.

Her hands fumbled with his collar. He tilted his head back and kissed her a little slower. She let him calm the pace and when she started on the second button, she managed to open it without so much trouble. Her fingers brushing along his breastbone as she worked her way lower held his attention. The kiss was almost an after thought. Slow and lazy as she unbuttoned his clothing. She had to sit up to finish opening the shirt and the break in the kisses gave him a moment to breathe.

"Stay there for a moment," he said in a gasping voice that didn't sound like it belonged to him. He put a hand up against her stomach to keep her from leaning back down once she'd finished the last button. Her hands lingered on his stomach, absently tracing his muscles as she watched him to see what he wanted.

"I want to touch you," he told her.

"Anything you want," she said.

"Really?"

"Why are you asking it like that? What do you want?"

"I don't know. Everything."

"Start here," she said.

He opened her shirt slowly. She had put back on the borrowed men's clothing in case they needed to leave in the night and it would be safer to travel as a group of men rather than dragging along a woman who would make people ask questions. He started at the lowest buttons and worked higher grabbing the fabric to tug her closer when he got to the top buttons. Her breasts were bare and smooth under the fabric. He could only see the edge of them. He stroked the swell of one with his fingers and she bit her lip. He used both hands to push the fabric back and run his fingers along her skin until he'd pushed the shirt away from her and could see her nipples and the unbroken line of her body to her waist.

She glanced at Jem and Will followed suit. Jem was been the first one to bring up the word jealousy and Will did not want him to have any reason to worry about that. Jem was smiling and very close. He was close enough that he didn't need to do much more than tilt his chin to kiss Will on the mouth. Will's hands were still resting on Tessa's body and he grabbed hold of her a little tighter as he pressed back into the kiss. The kiss didn’t last long. Jem pulled back and helped Tessa take off the shirt.

The shyness snapped back immediately, Will saw it on her face as soon as she was bare. He grabbed her and rolled them both over. It took a few awkward moments to push the duvet back and get everyone tucked into the covers. Jem lay back and Will tucked Tessa in beside him before lying down over her and pulling the nest of blankets closed around them.

"Better?" he asked.

"I might be the only woman on the planet that finds being trapped between two men reassuring," she said.

"I'm sure there is some other group of people out there somewhere who have done this," Jem said.

"It can't be common," she said.

"Maybe not," he said.

"The question stands, is this better?" Will asked.

"It's always better to have you closer," she said.

"Good," he said.

He kissed her. He hadn't taken his own shirt off yet. It hung open and but in the way. Too many hands helped pull it away from him so he could press his entire body down against Tessa's. Her breasts against his chest, her body trembling under his hands, the warmth of her skin against his as she opened her mouth and pulled him in to kiss again and again.

"I don't know what comes next," he whispered against her lips. "I mean, I know the very vaguest basics but I have never done it and I don't want to hurt you."

"You're not going to hurt me," she said.

"You two have done this, right?" Will asked in a low mutter.

"Yes, but only the one time," Jem said.

"Have you two done it?" Tessa asked.

"We've spent some time together," Jem said. Tessa shot him a glare and he sighed. "We have done things together but not what you and I have done but only because the anatomy involved is rather different."

"What do you do... given that ... issue?" she asked.

"I can show you," Jem said.

Will laughed. Jem pushed on his hip and he let himself be rolled away from Tessa. Jem nudged her up so that she lay on her side cuddled against him and facing Will. Jem liked being pulled back into it and Will wasn't going to question his right to be there. Jem was tight against Tessa's back and held her with one arm that started around her waist but got distracted running up her body to her breasts. Will watched for a little while as Jem make her eyes flutter shut by rubbing the pad of his thumb against her nipple. He rolled in closer to kiss her forehead and her cheeks as she melted into that touch.

"Lie back down," Jem told him.

Will did as he was told and arched his hips so Jem could pull the last of his clothes off. He was too happy to be there to feel self-conscious about being the first one naked. Then Jem led Tessa's hand out and curled their hands around Will's cock. He was hard enough that the contact made him flinch. Tessa looked at him in surprise or concern and he kissed her before she could start second guessing anything. This was wonderful. This was everything he wanted. He did not want anyone stopping because he wasn't in full control of what his reactions.

Tessa was hesitant but fascinated. When Will dragged his eyes back open, he saw her watching him carefully as Jem guided her hand. They were gentle but unrelenting and Will's self control was slipping fast. He couldn't find his voice before it had slipped between his fingers entirely.

"Yes, yes, yes, don't stop," he said.

Someone stroked his cheek and he wasn't sure who it was. He had given up any attempt at self control. All he wanted was to be touched. The release built slowly and then faster. He pushed back into their hands and Tessa was talking to him but all he could hear was her voice, he couldn't think clearly enough to care what the words were, not when he was this close to falling apart.

He came hard. Shuddering and moaning and making a mess. He fumbled to pull someone in closer and then Tessa was there again him and he wrapped his arms around her waist and held her body tight against his. She kissed him and pet his hair until he felt like himself again. He shuddered and shifted so he wasn’t pressed in quite so tight. He was too sensitive but still desperate for the touch.

"Not how I had planned that to go," he admitted.

"We'll have to do it again," Tessa said.

"I'm going to need a minute before that," he said. "Maybe more than a minute."

Will kissed her before he had to talk about that.

Jem stole her attention away. Will refused to be left on the margins of what was about to happen. When the two of them settled back down with far less clothing on, Will made sure that Tessa was tucked in close to him. She lay on her back with her head on his shoulder. He played with her hair and laced his fingers with hers and she pressed against him.

She relaxed as Jem ran careful hands over her body. She arched into the touches and let him push her back down with a smile and a sigh. Jem's hand sometimes strayed off of her body to run along Will's but his attention was caught on her. There was an intensity between them that Will was still on the fringes of. This was as new for them as it was for him.

“This is good?” Jem asked.

“This is perfect,” Tessa whispered back.

Will didn't see it but he felt her gasp and tense as Jem slid inside her. She took a long slow breath and Jem pulled back. They did it a few times, easing into the act slowly. Jem was close and his attention held on her, only jumping to Will in short flashes before he turned back to hold her gaze. Tessa was breathing hard and she held onto Will's hand hard.

"Is this…?" Will asked.

"It’s fine, it'll be better in a minute," Tessa said.

Jem was careful with her and by the time he started to thrust his body against hers, she was holding onto him and murmuring encouragement. Will touched them both and his whole spent body reacted to the way they moved against each other. He wasn't ready to be hard again but he wanted it. Tessa gasped softly and held onto his fingers, lacing hers tightly each time Jem pushed into her. Will ran his other hand down Jem's back and shivered at the feeling of the muscles shifting under his touch.

Jem buried his face into the juncture between Tessa's neck and Will's shoulder so he was pressed in against both of them as he started to move faster and then lost his control. He came in a shivering shudder that took him far harder than Will had ever seen from him before. He hadn't been more reserved than Will was, he hadn't been as healthy. He stayed still in the moments after and Will stroked his back.

He released her a little and slid to the side so Tessa was pressed in tight between them. She was breathing hard and Jem kissed her.

Will slid his hand down her stomach and between her legs. He had heard about this but never tried it. It was apparently possible and the possibility was enough to make him want to attempt it. Tessa sighed and spread her knees for the touch. He stroked the wet folds of her body until he got a stronger reaction and then he chased that reaction until he found a place to touch her that made her moan and grab hold of him. He rubbed his fingers in slow hard circles against her body and she twisted her hips.

Jem looked at him and Will reached out and grabbed Jem's wrist. He wanted to do the same thing that they had done to him. Jem let him rearrange their fingers so they were both touching her but it wasn't as simple as the hand on his cock had been. Nobody stopped to care that it wasn’t perfectly elegant. Tessa spread her legs and arched her back and pressed into it. It was all experimenting. She gasped and then started to pull away. Will didn't let her go immediately. She cried out and he finally realized what was happened in and gave her some space.

She was flushed and panting when he pulled her around to look at him.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

"Wonderful. Strange. Good. I don’t know? Good." she said.

Will kissed her and eased her onto her back. Her knees fell open and her arms curled around his neck and pulled him in close but her expression was startled. Her body was more ready than her thoughts were. Will forced himself still and touched his nose against hers. She blinked up at him. Startled but content.

"Can I do I this?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

Will cast a glance at Jem. Jem’s dark hair was falling his eyes and the color was still high in his cheeks. He looked bright and healthy in a way that Will had never imagined possible. Jem just laughed at him and shoved him in the shoulder. Will watched him for a few moments and Jem shoved him again. Will turned his attention back to Tessa.

Getting his knees in the right place took longer than he would have liked. Tessa was soft and patient with him. She ran her fingers through his hair and kept reaching out to touch Jem. She kept smiling. Will kissed her before he slid into her. Her body was very hot and wet and shuddered around him as he pushed into her. She grabbed hold of him and buried her face against him with a moan.

Will had already come once and the next orgasm was a long way away. That did not seem to be how Tessa's body worked. She was squirming and gasping after only a few thrusts. He cradled her and went slow. He nuzzled her neck and rolled his hips against her. Slow and even and deep. It wasn’t some intentioned plan. There was probably some way to do it right and some way to do it wrong but all he wanted was to be pressed in this tight. He wanted to hold onto her and make it last forever.

Tessa held him with all the same intensity. Jem was there running his hands over both of them.  A distraction and a comfort, all at once. Will glanced up at him and Jem kissed him. A distraction. A comfort. Jem was still flushed and happy and lazy. The careful boy Will imagined him as was washed away by this happy indolent smile. Jem was all slow hands and dark eyes, kind and curious and very close. Will had to drag his attention away and back to the girl in his arms.

She was breathing hard and watching him. The shyness came back and Will smiled at her and kissed her.

“I love you,” he said before she could start to blush and turn away.

“I love you too,” she told him.

Will nodded and kissed her and pressed his body down close to hers again. She sighed and relaxed. Her arms were around his neck and she held on.

She had progressed from breathing hard to panting and shifting against him. He didn’t know what she wanted but when he tried to stop and ask, she grabbed him a little harder and whispered against his neck, “Please, don’t stop.”

He didn’t.

He was so focused on her that his orgasm crept up on him. He was nose to nose with her, his fingers buried in her hair and his body pressed in tight on every thrust. She tried to pull herself together enough to hold his gaze but then she would gasp and curl in as her eyes fell shut. She shivered and he felt it through his entire body, it was the thing that pushed him past the edge. He shuddered and pushed into her harder. She moaned as he came and collapsed against her.

“You’re beautiful,” Jem said.

“She really is,” Will answered.

He still had his face buried against her neck and was finding it hard to find the energy or the inclination to move. Jem’s fingers pushed through his hair and even that wasn’t enough to pull his attention back to the real world. Jem leaned over him and kissed his shoulder. He lifted his head enough to look at Jem who was smiling.

“You’re beautiful too,” Jem said.

“Oh, I know, I’m Adonis incarnate,” Will said.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Tessa muttered.

“No, not that far,” Jem agreed.

“Why do I love either of you? You’re both terrible,” Will said.  

“Says the boy who just described himself as Adonis.”

“If I’m Adonis then that makes you, one of you, both of you, whatever. It makes you Aphrodite. So really, it’s a compliment.”

Tessa started to laugh. Will could feel it throughout his entire body and it made him laugh too. He reached out to grab hold of Jem and pull him in closer. They lay together for a long time, laughing and enjoying the comfort of being wrapped up together.  


	52. The Harbour

The ferry came into the Helsinki harbour at the same ponderously slow pace it had taken down the coast from the little town where they had boarded. Jem watched Helsinki grow as they got closer. He leaned on the rail and his thoughts were tangled up in memories of arriving in England on a steamship still fighting down the feeling that he had been ejected from Alicante like an unwanted house guest. He had been a child but he had still wanted someone to tell him that his help would be invaluable in finding and destroying Yanluo and they needed him to stay in the capital after all. Instead he had been sent off to a filthy foggy city he had never even seen before.

Jem had grown up in Shanghai. Europeans, Englishmen in particular, liked to pretend that their ports were the largest in the world but Shanghai had been one of the largest international ports in the world.  Liverpool hadn't impressed him when he'd landed there and in other circumstances, this harbour probably wouldn't have either. It was smaller than Shanghai, not nearly as busy as Liverpool. And yet, it charmed him immediately. Jem liked the neat rows of orderly buildings with the equally spaced windows and neat brickwork. After wilderness and farmsteads and small towns, it was nice to look at a city.

They had caught the ferry headed south from a small logging town just like the proprietor from the first inn had told them they could. They had spent most of the trip down the coast curled up in their cabin. Together. They had gotten more comfortable with each other. Tessa was starting to lose her shyness around Will and Will was starting to lose his anxiety.

“What do you mean, he’s anxious?” Tessa had asked him one night as they sat on the deck while Will prowled around the ship looking for distraction. Jem had mentioned that he was relieved that Will wasn’t so anxious about it all and Tessa had frowned at him.

“He hides it well but he’s worried,” Jem said.

“About what?”

“About losing something he cares about, I think.”

“Neither of us are going anywhere.”

“I know that and I’m glad to see that Will is starting to believe it too.”

That had been two days ago. The ferry pulled into every port along the coast and took on passengers and it made for an extremely slow trip. Jem had complained about trekking across the country and now he found himself missing it. He wanted to get up and move. The port was coming closer and the journey was finally ending. He looked forward to getting out on land again. He was still getting used to a body that worked properly and he wanted to test it out.

As the ship slowed even further, Will and Tessa joined him on the deck, as did many other passengers who were excitedly pointing out the sights they recognized. The great white church with a green dome and golden accents stood over the city and Tessa smiled at it. It was high summer and the city and port were busy. Carriages rushed to and fro along the streets. The docks were swarming with people loading and unloading cargo. The language was starting to sound familiar enough that it faded into a comforting backdrop.

"I like it," Tessa said.

"What?" Will asked.

"The city, look at it, I like it."

"I offended on London's behalf."

"You once called London an awful wonder of God."

"I did because it is. But it's our awful wonder."

"I want to go to see the chapel."

"Cathedral. I think that thing is too big to be a chapel."

"Yes, yes, you're always right and oh woe, how wrong I was to argue," Tessa said with a wave of her hand that made Jem break out into laughter. Will looked offended that she would make a joke about his refusal to back down from any petty argument. Tessa grabbed his arm and smiled up at him and Will's expression immediately softened again.

She cuddled into him and said, "I still want to see it. We can stay a few days before we get back on another boat, can't we? We've already been gone forever. What's a few more days to go sightseeing?"

They didn't have a chance to go sightseeing.

The ferry made to the dock. Slowly. It was tied off. Slowly. Then people and parcels were unloaded at an extremely rapid pace. Everyone who had been trapped on the ponderous vessel took their things and all but jumped over the side in desire to be free of it. Tessa stayed attached to Will's arm as they made the trek down the steep gangway.

They had barely made it off the boat when they were interrupted by a call of: "Mr. Herondale?"

They were dressed like the locals. None of them were expected to be recognized or to know anyone at all in the city. Jem wasn’t even sure if there was an Institute here. Will frowned and turned to look at the source of the call and Jem followed his gaze. A broad blond man was standing by the edge of the water and he waved when he saw that they had turned to look at him.

Standing a few feet away, was a tall man with brown skin and black hair. Jem had only met the man a handful of times but knew enough of Will’s stories to know that Will considered Magnus a friend. Magnus wore a black suit that had been tailored to make him look even taller than he was and he was tall without it. He had his hair swept back and wore a bright purple cravat. His cat eyes were on full display and he distinctly did not belong on the gangway of a common ferry from the northern provinces of any country.

"Is that Magnus Bane?" Jem asked.

"That is undoubtedly Magnus Bane," Will said.

Will took a step away from Tessa and headed towards the odd pair. He had only made it a few steps out of the crowd before he was hit by a small body. A blue dress with white details, black hair, a blur of movement and words in a language that Jem couldn’t understand. The girl called Wil’s name and caught him around the waist. Will was so startled by it that he almost fell off the pier and into the ocean and had to grab both a lamp post and his sister to keep that from happening.

Cecily was yelling at him in Welsh and Will was just smiling at her. He finally caught her face in his hands and got her to quiet long enough for him to get a word in edgewise. By that point, Jem had fallen in step beside him. Jem looked over Cecily’s head at him and raised his eyebrows in a question.

“Did you send a letter on ahead?” Jem asked.

“Me and what post office?” Will asked.

The others had joined them, closing the gap. Jem felt immediately out of place. How was he supposed to behave when there were all these other people around? Magnus looked hard at him and then his attention flitted back to the Herondale siblings. The stranger, Cecily, Magnus, the crowd around them going about their business as though they weren’t there at all. Tessa reached out and grabbed his hand and he squeezed her fingers in reassurance. He wasn’t the only one unsure of what was happening.

“We’ve been using a tracking spell since you reappeared on the map,” Magnus filled in.

The man beside him, the big blond one, was a local Shadowhunter named Virtanen.

Between Virtanen and Cecily, the walk was a blur of conversation. Will had been pulled away with Cecily so she could further berate him for worrying her and Jem and Tessa had found themselves walking with Virtanen and listening to him talk. His English was accented but perfect and he claimed to have little chance to use it outside of Council meetings.

He liked to talk. And talk. And talk.

Jem felt like he could have filled a book with what he learned if he could remember it. Helsinki did have an Institute, one of only two in the country though they had hopes of expanding to four. They had been having trouble in the farther flung areas with Nakki and Menninkainen and two Institutes were hardly sufficient. Jem wasn’t sure what a Nakki was but Virtanen didn’t give him a chance to ask. He was off on a tangent involving the Consul. He explained it all while he was walking them back towards a hotel where the others were staying.

“I have need five minutes with Mr. Carstairs,” Magnus said.

Jem was grateful for the interruption. Tessa cast him an alarmed look as Virtanen switched from talking about Institute expansion plans to his daughter who was about her age and a very accomplished archer. Jem have her an apologetic shrug and mouthed a promise that it would only take a moment. It had been so long since they had really talked to anyone but each other that Jem found himself scrambling to remember how to have normal conversation.

He fell back into step with Magnus. Magnus was tall and severe looking. The black suit, the bright tie, the bright eyes. He was a study in contrasts and Jem had to remind himself not to be intimidated. Magnus was Will’s friend and an ally of the Clave. He looked impressive but Jem wasn’t going to let that make him nervous. He looked Magnus in the eye and waited for him to explain what he wanted.

“I’m a little surprised that you’re here. It’s surprising to see you running errands for the Clave,” Jem said.

“I don’t like puzzles,” Magnus said.

“It’s just that? Not that you consider Will a friend?”

“Against my better judgment and all good sense, yes, I consider the boy a friend.”

“Befriending Will is always against one’s better judgment,” Jem said.

“Tell me everything,” Magnus said.

“Everything?” Jem asked.

“You were someplace untraceable. I wasn’t aware that more than two untraceable places existed on this plane of existence. The Faerie courts and the Silent City are beyond the reach of my magic but you were in neither of those places. We checked. You’re also not dead which is such a surprising turn of events that I had not even attempted to track your location after the first week,” Magnus said.

Jem glanced at him and smiled and then started to explain it. They would explain it over and over again but the first time, Jem just told it as a story. An amusing anecdote. The tale of the time they were stranded in the woods and met some faeries. Later he would give it as an official report, he would explain it before the Clave and Council, he would explain it again to the Silent Brothers. His health would be checked and checked again.

But the first time, he just told it to Magnus like he was telling it to a friend.

The Nephilim had put them up in a hotel near the Institute. It was a small medieval church that didn’t have a lot of space but that wasn’t what had kept them here at a mundane establishment. Virtanen’s wife had refused to allow Magnus to stay in the Institute and Cecily had decided that as a show of support, they would all stay outside the Institute.

When they arrived, Gabriel Lightwood was at the door. He stood by the door with his arms crossed and his sandy hair brushed back away from his eyes. He was dressed well and it made Jem aware of what a mess the three of them were. Tessa stood beside him wearing a man’s suit that hung loose off her shoulders. Will’s hair was long enough that he had started making jokes about hairpins and curlers. A hotel like this usually wouldn’t rent a room to a group that looked as rag tag as they did.

“Of all the people, Gabriel Lightwood,” Will said.

“Herondale.”

“I had not expected a welcoming committee at all. I am simply-” Will started and Tessa hit him in the arm before he could say something rude.

Jem wasn’t sure what to make of Gabriel’s inclusion in the little rescue party. The last any of them had seen of Gabriel Lightwood, the man had still been standing at his father’s side while Benedict attempted to have the Institute wrested from their hands. To see him on a rescue mission on behalf of one of Charlotte Branwell’s household was a surprise.

Gabriel didn’t answer Will’s comment. He was looking at Jem with a frown, “You’re alive.”

“Thus far,” Jem said.

“You’d best come in and explain what in Raziel’s name happened to the three of you,” Gabriel said.

“And have some tea. You need to eat something,” Cecily said.

Will gave her a look and then glanced at Jem over her head. Jem shrugged in response. Will could pretend to be put out by his sister’s fussing all he wanted but he wasn’t fooling anyone. Cecily was worrying over him and ignoring everyone else and Will was immensely glad to see her. He was smiling all the way up the stairs and into the suite of rooms where a table of food had been laid out.

They sat down around it. Jem reached out to take Tessa’s hand and below the table he let his knee rest against Will’s so he could keep them both close. Tessa curled her fingers around his and Will responded by leaning his elbow on Jem’s shoulder and pointing across the table at Gabriel.

“Are you spying for your father again?”

“My father is dead.”

Will went still and the sarcastic smile dropped off his face. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You aren’t but it is beside the point. The point is that I am here on behalf of Charlotte Branwell and the London Institute to assure that you are returned to London and to make arrangements in case of tragedy,” he said.

Jem looked up from stirring his cup of tea and Gabriel looked away from him. Charlotte thought he was dead. Henry thought he was dead and probably blamed himself for it. Jem looked down again. Beside him, Tessa squeezed his fingers and Will didn’t pull away. They both held onto him as he reordered his thoughts. There were people in the world who had mourned his death. It shouldn't have come as a surprise. He knew that Charlotte and Henry cared for him and yet it still shook him. 

“I think we all need to understand what happened and where you went.”

And they told the story, together.


	53. Epilogue: Home

At the end of a narrow, quiet street was a narrow, quiet house that had been painted blue and white. It had been uninhabited for only a few weeks before it sold. It was four stories tall because the neighbourhood had left no space to grow out and the only way to fit in three bedrooms, an office and a drawing room was to stack them.

It was still empty.

There was no furniture, the kitchen didn’t have a single pot or bowl in it and the stove looked lost and lonely without so much as a table to keep it company. The walls were bare and still bore the wallpaper choices from the previous tenant. A beautiful damask in the drawing room. A hideous floral pattern in the largest bedroom. A handful of uninteresting patterns in the hallway that no one would bother to change until they started to peel.

A set of curtains had been left in the drawing room or maybe they had been hung by the agent to make it look less abandoned from the street. From the street, it looked neat and tidy. A very small front garden barely had room to grow a handful of flowers and a square of grass. A pair of flower boxes had been hung on the wrought iron fence and the geraniums planted in them were starting to sprout as the season turned to spring.

“This one,” Tessa said.

“Why?” Jem asked.

“Because it’s the right one, this one is home,” she said.

She would come up with reasons as to why it was the right place over the next few weeks but initially it was feeling and nothing more. She looked at and she knew. They had toured other houses: places that were bigger or closer to the Institute, places that were smaller or taller or had bigger kitchens and servant quarters. None of them had felt like they could have been home.

She looked at the dining room and could imagine sitting there on Monday mornings and sharing a pot of tea. She could picture the bookshelves in the office and the new furniture in the bedroom. It wasn’t home yet. It was just an empty building but looking at it, she was sure that they had found the right one. This place was the one that would be home.

They had chosen it before the wedding but they wouldn’t move in until two weeks after.

The ceremony had been nice enough. The dress had been fashionable but far too much. Too much lace. Too many pieces. Too many flowers in her hair. There had been too many people there that she had never met before. Will had been strange and distant for the week leading up to it. The wedding was something to get out of the way. There had been good parts but all in all it had been more hassle than celebration.

But moving into the house, that was different.

That was the piece that she was looking forward to. Tessa had lived in the same apartment for her entire life. Her parents had moved into the little flat before she had been born. She had moved out to leave for London to find Nate. She hadn’t thought of herself as prone to that sort of sentimental nostalgia. She didn’t really miss the place but as the possibility of moving into a home again, she found herself thinking of the apartment fondly. She missed having a place that was home.

The Institute was where she lived but that didn’t make it home. Home was something more than the place where you slept and ate. Home was a place where you made memories worth keeping, where you felt safe, where you could be entirely yourself without worrying about who was watching. There were memories enough in the walls of the Institute but they weren’t all good.

There were memories she wanted to leave behind.

Axel Mortmain was dead. She had survived changing in to an angel. She had learned the truth of what she was. People had almost died and she had risked her own life to save them. The trouble that had began with her Aunt’s death had passed and now Tessa was free to live her life as she chose. She was as safe as anyone else in the world and that felt like a revelation.

What felt like last piece of the terrible year had come only three days before they were going to pick up the keys. The letter had come from Virtanen’s Institute.  The storm blew out of the Unseelie Court and the King had agreed to close the crack between his court and that particular corner of reality. With the storm broken, the Finnish Shadowhunters had moved in to start dealing with the rogue faeries.

“Mortmain has had help from faeries before, do we really believe that the Unseelie Court is telling the truth?” Tessa asked.

“The great thing about the faerie courts is that they’re all but untouchable. We’re not going to lay siege to their gates without a very good reason. We can make it more difficult for them to operate in the mortal realms but the Unseelie care even less about that than the Seelie,” Will said.

“You mean tot tell me that we’re going to let him lie and tell us that those faeries were rogue and he didn’t have anything to do with what they were doing?” Tessa asked.

“Faeries don’t lie,” Jem said. “What the King said was that they were not operating under his orders which is the truth. And yes, the Clave is going to let that particular half-truth go as long as there aren’t anymore villages like the one we found. The battle isn’t always worth fighting.”

Tessa hadn’t liked that. The faeries they had seen were not behind anything. They weren’t smart enough to plan anything. They weren’t organized enough to have orchestrated sales of their blood iron. It felt like the real villain was getting away. She had to remind herself that Mortmain was gone and he had been the root of the poison. She let herself be convinced that starting a war with the Faerie Courts would cause more problems than it could possibly solve.

She wanted it over.

She wanted to move on.

She wanted to pack up her things and pick out furniture and upholstery and curtains. She wanted to leave this chapter behind. Faeries and blood and metal monsters. Dead families and threats and curses. She wanted to leave it all in the past.

The future was bright and the future was what mattered.

 

Will met them outside the house the day that they could move in. He had volunteered to meet the furniture delivery so that Jem and Tessa could have breakfast with Charlotte and Henry that morning. Charlotte was still fussing over Jem a little too much and Henry was still reeling from the revelation that he hadn’t actually killed anyone with his portal. They were always kind and always well meaning but sometimes they wore on Jem’s patience and Tessa had to try and redirect the conversation without appearing to do so.

It had been a slightly awkward conversation that was intended to be about giving advice. Of course, Henry and Charlotte had simply continued to live at the Institute and had inherited all the staff that went with it so they didn’t really have much to offer. Tessa didn’t come away from it with any better understanding of how to go about hiring a housekeeper or a cook or how to keep a household budget. They were going to have to figure it out along the way. The conversation was interrupted by something in Henry’s pocket exploding. Then it had been interrupted again by an emergency involving a warlock near the Parliament.

Tessa had been impatient all morning. She had to restrain herself from throwing her arms around Will when the carriage came to a stop. It was such a relief to see him. He was very proper when he helped her out onto the sidewalk. She held onto his hand a little too long as she stopped to tilt her head back and look at the house.

The house.

Her house.

Their house.

“Do you like it?” she asked Will.

He had come along with Jem when Jem had signed the papers but she had never had a chance to gauge his reaction to the place she had chosen. They had become adept at manufacturing plausible reasons to have Will around but they hadn’t been able to come up with a proper reason to why they two of them needed to come out to the house together. She watched him now.

He glanced over at her. He had had a haircut since they had gotten back and he looked older than she expected. She expected him to be a little bit roguish. A boy you weren’t sure if you could trust. Instead, he looked like a respectable young man. He wore a well-cut navy coat buttoned all the way up and it made him look even taller than he really was. He tilted his hat back so that he could look up at the building and study it before he answered her. 

“It’s perfect,” Will said after frowning up at the façade.

“Good,” she said with a sigh.

Will squeezed her hand and then let go of it. Jem fell into step beside him and smiled at the place. He was the one who had done the signing which meant that he was the one who had the keys in hand. He led the way up the steps and unlocked the door. He had told her that morning that he liked having keys to his own house. He had never lived anywhere but Institutes and the novelty of homeownership was even stronger for him than it was for her.

The doorstep was painted blue. Jem paused to tap it with the toe of his shiny black shoe. Tessa only half remembered the conversation when he had said that death should have a cheerful doorstep. The doorstep hadn’t been blue when they had toured the place last. He had had it painted blue. He had hired someone. She pursed her lips at him and he laughed out loud.

“Your sense of humour continues to be a hazard,” Will said.

“As it always will be, you should really get used to it,” Jem said.

“I like it,” she said.

“The humour?”

“Absolutely not. The blue around the door. It is cheerful,” she said.

“You think I’m hilarious,” Jem said.

“You have a number of excellent characteristics. Your morbid humour is not at the top of that list.”

Jem snorted and Will nodded at her. These moments were more and more common. They still had silent conversations that didn’t include anyone else but more and more, she was just as much a part as they were. Will would glance at her across the room if Jem wasn’t there and she understood what he was saying. Jem quirked a half smile and she didn’t need him to say it because she knew why he was smiling.

They stepped inside.

Neither she nor Jem had much luggage. They were orphans and neither of them owned much beyond their clothing. Cyril dragged it up the steps behind them and for a few minutes they were distracted by practicalities. Trunks were brought upstairs, a few other boxes were left on the dining table to be sorted. Cyril left them alone without needing to be asked. He offered congratulations and then vanished.

Later, Will would probably have to hire a company to move all his books but they had decided that it would be a bit too forward to have him move in right away. The dance was an exercise in frustration. The balancing act between could be explained away by the nature of Jem and Will’s relationship and what might make people start wondering about them.

They stepped into the drawing room and someone had dragged the new furniture around so that it looked like someone lived there. Nothing on the walls. The old curtains. No rug. Nothing on the bookshelves. But the chairs and a small sofa had been drawn up around the fireplace and laid out with a few cushions and a tea set.

She let her imagination run away for a moment. A fire in the grate, books on the shelves, the lanterns lit on the street outside the window. Jem playing songs on his violin and smiling at the music. It would be a good place for a cozy evening. She couldn’t help a smile from spreading across her face and she grabbed hold of Jem’s fingers and squeezed in happiness.

“Did you do this?” Tessa asked looking around the drawing room. She looked at Will who had lost the hat but not the coat and now leaned against the rail in the hall and watched them with a little smile. He looked proud of himself.

“I oversaw while the delivery men did it,” Will said. “But I will certainly take credit if you want to give it to me.”

“It’s wonderful,” Tessa said.

“It will be a good place,” Will said.

“I’m already fond of it,” Jem said.

Will was still standing back and it was Jem who went to grab his hand and pull him forward so they could stand together in the middle of the room. Will glanced down. He was shy for a moment before he he looped one arm around Tessa’s shoulder and the other around Jem’s.

Tessa laughed and leaned against him. He pressed a kiss to her temple and then did the same to Jem. Jem laughed and pulled him around for a proper kiss. For a moment, that was all that mattered. Jem tilted his chin up and turned into the kiss. When Will pulled back, Jem looked at him with soft eyes and a little smile.

“Are you both quite sure that you aren’t sick of me yet?” Will asked in an officious tone. Jem rolled his eyes. 

“I’ll never be sick of you, William Herondale,” Tessa said.

“I, on the other hand, have been sick of you since I was thirteen years old. I’m immune to it now,” Jem said.

Will kissed him again. This time when they drew back, Will didn’t ruin it with a comment. He let Jem stare at him. Tessa stayed close. She liked these quiet little moments when they looked so happy together. Will turned to look at her and she leaned up on her tiptoes and touched her nose to his.

“I’m going to kiss you in a moment,” Will said to her. “But if I do any more kissing right this instant, I’m going to get distracted and I bought you a present.”

“A present?” she asked. “Like a housewarming gift?”

“I picked it out for you last summer so it isn’t really a housewarming gift.”

He took the gift off the table and held it out to her. She had been too distracted by everything else to notice it before. The room was unfamiliar but now that she was looking, it was obviously a gift. It was a small rectangle wrapped in white paper. Beside it was another larger package in the same paper. She took it from Will and held it in both hands.

“You bought me a book?” she asked as she took it.

Jem started to open his mouth to make a comment but Will kicked him in the ankle and pulled him in a little closer. Will was still holding onto Jem when he said, “It has an inscription. I wrote it the night that my curse was broken. I never gave it to you for obvious reasons. I think though that this is right moment.”

Tessa sat down on the edge of the nearest chair and carefully unwrapped the book. A Tale of Two Cities. She ran her hand over the cover and smiled at it. Will was looking down at her and she smiled up at him. She opened the front page and read what he had written there.

 

_Tess, Tess, Tessa._

_Was there ever a more beautiful sound than your name? To speak it aloud makes my heart ring like a bell. Strange to imagine that, isn’t it – a heart ringing – but when you touch me that is what it is like: as if my heart is ringing in my chest and the sound shivers down my veins and splinters my bones with joy._

_Why have I written these words in this book? Because of you. You taught me to love this book where I had scorned it. When I read it for the second time, with an open mind and heart, I felt the most complete despair and envy of Sydney Carton. Yes, Sydney, for even if he had no hope that the woman he loved would love him, at least he could tell her of his love. At least he could do something to prove his passion, even if that thing was to die._

_I would have chosen death for a chance to tell you the truth, Tessa, if I could have been assured that death would be my own. And that is why I envied Sydney, for he was free._

_And now at last I am free, and I can finally tell you, without fear of danger to you, all that I feel in my heart._

_You are not the last dream of my soul._

_You are the first dream, the only dream I ever was unable to stop myself from dreaming. You are the first dream of my soul, and from that dream I hope will come all other dreams, a lifetime’s worth._

_With hope at last,_

_Will Herondale_

 

She reread it and then read it one more time. The words were written in neat narrow handwriting on the first page of the book. She closed it and held it between her hands with her eyes shut.

“Tess?”

She looked up at him. He knelt down slowly in front of her and put his fingers gently on the book as though he was going to take it away from her. He face was all concern. He was upset. It took her a long moment to realize why. She was crying.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

Will smiled at her and she launched herself forward to wrap her arms around his neck. He wasn’t well balanced and they almost both went down to land in a heap on the floor. Will held onto her as she buried her face in his shirt and fumbled to remember how to talk.

“That is the most beautiful thing that anyone has ever written me,” she said.

Will wiped tears off her cheeks and kissed her on the forehead. She laughed and slowly untangled herself. Will pulled her along to the sofa so he could sit down beside her and keep an arm wrapped around her shoulder. She opened the book again and reread the note.

“Is what you got me going to make me cry too?” Jem asked.

“Don’t make fun,” Tessa said.

Jem tilted her face up and kissed her, “I’m sorry,” he said but he was still smiling. Tessa wrinkled her nose at him and he giggled again. She lay her head on Will’s shoulder and stuck her tongue out at him. He kissed her again and then went to pick up the other box.

He sat down on Will’s other side and opened it. Tessa leaned over to look. It was a case of knives. Four throwing knives each with a rune carved into the handle. They shone bright and were probably made of silver. They were beautiful but they were a strange choice for either a housewarming gift or a romantic one. She cast Will a glance but he was watching Jem.

Jem picked up one of the knives and turned it over in his hand, testing the balance and getting a good look at it. Tucked into the case’s lid was a cream colored envelope.

“What does the note say?” Tessa asked.

Jem carefully put the knife back down in the case and took the letter out. Will watched his every movement and Tessa leaned in a little closer to read what it said. It was a letter like hers.

 

_Dear James,_

  
_You told me once not to be ordinary. I regret to inform you that I am. I am and always have been ordinary. I am just a man. Perhaps that's presumptuous. I am just a boy as I was when you held your hand out to me._

_The most extraordinary thing about me is and always has been you._

_Your soul has always drawn mine in and drawn mine up. I am better when I am with you. Our souls are knit.   Perhaps we are not one person but I am not and never will be a complete person without you. In a world where I had to hide all three, you were my joy, my love, my truth._

_We stand now at the start of something we had never thought to imagine when we were children. We stand at the start of a lifetime. And so I hold out my hand and I ask of you the same thing that you asked of me all those years ago. I ask that you not be ordinary._

_Say you will train with me._

_Say you will stand with me._   
  
_With hope at last,_

  
_William Herondale_   


“Will,” Jem said.

“Yes?”

“You are not ordinary.”

“Only because I have the both of you.”

Jem smiled, “You will always have me. You’ll always have us.”

Will squeezed his arm around Tessa and leaned in to kiss Jem. They sat together in the front room of their new home and talked about the future they were building. 

They had finally made it home.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing this story was a two year journey in which the story got poked at and abandoned multiple times before being picked up for NaNoWriMo and then abandoned again after 30 000 words before I could finally commit to getting it done. I can actually make the rather pretentious statement that I wrote it across three continents. I really enjoyed the process even if it happened in starts and fits. I hope you enjoyed the journey through it. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has read this story. Whether you have been with it since the sketchy ficlet days when I thought that it would be a 10 000 word single night of bed sharing through the unwieldy google-docs stage through those who will (hopefully) binge read it in a single sitting ages after it was finished. 
> 
> Thank you for spending some time with it.
> 
> A special thank you for @daisytrains and @foreverinfiction and the others who read unfinished drafts and helped make them better.
> 
> And another special thank you to the reviewers who reminded me that there was an audience out there. Thank you for taking the time to leave your thoughts and reactions. You make my day, always. 
> 
> With love and angst and another cactus,  
> Asha. 
> 
> PS: I didn't change the text of Tessa's letter. It's exactly the same as from canon. I even copied it off a quote site rather than typing it up again so *footnote citation in proper MLA formatting goes here*  
> PPS: NOPE I'm not at any point in this AU ever going to address the parabatai curse. In some other story maybe but not this one.


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